Muhammad Massom Akhtar1,
Akbar Waheed2,
Muhammad Shahid Farooq3,
Rahat Shamim4,
Narjis Batool4,
Ammara Hakeem4,
Muhammad Umer Nadeem4,
Zikria Saleem5 
For correspondence:- Zikria Saleem Email: xikria@outlook.com Tel:+923229801981
Accepted: 17 April 2021 Published: 31 May 2021
Citation: Akhtar MM, Waheed A, Farooq MS, Shamim R, Batool N, Hakeem A, et al. Evaluation of impact of pharmaceutical care services on cardiologist adherence to hypertension Guidelines JNC 7: A critical prospect for rational use of drugs in Pakistan. Trop J Pharm Res 2021; 20(5):1029-1038 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v20i5.21
© 2021 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..
Purpose: To assess the adherence of cardiologists to JNC7 and the impact of pharmacists in reducing clinical inertia by managing high blood pressure in the cardiology out-patient department of the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Methods: This was a pre- and post-interventional prospective study in which data was abstracted from patients’ history notes or prescription of selected patients at baseline and follow-up visits by applying a reliable tool. The data were abstracted again from the same patients to evaluate the cardiologists’ adherence with the same parameters after 2,4 and 6 months. The sample size for this study was 116 patients and descriptive statistics were used for categorical variables. For the comparison of cardiologist’s adherence to JNC7, means and paired ‘t’ test were used at the level of 0.05 significance.
Results: At baseline, the mean overall percentage of cardiologists’ adherence to JNC7 was 46.7 ± 18.9 %. This significantly improved to 98.8 ± 6.0 % after 2 months of the pharmacist intervening by way of discussions with cardiologists. The cardiologists’ adherence was further improved to 100 % after 4 and 6 months.
Conclusion: Improvement in cardiologists’ adherence to JNC 7 guidelines and involvement of the pharmacist enhance the documentation of BP goal, lifestyle modifications and uncontrolled BP. All these helps to overcome clinical inertia that ultimately leads to better BP control and rational use of medicines.
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