William E. Smith

ASHP guidelines: Minimum standard for pharmacies in hospitals

The following minimum standard guidelines are intended to serve as a basic guide for the provision of pharmacy services in hospitals. These guidelines outline a minimum level of services that most hospital pharmacy departments should consistently provide. The reader is strongly encouraged to review the American Society of Health-System Pharmacy (ASHP) guidance documents referenced throughout these guidelines for more detailed descriptions. Certain elements of these guidelines may be applicable to other health care settings or may be useful in evaluating the scope and quality of pharmacy services.

The Pharmacy Service of Memorial Hospital Medical Center

This article identifies the scope of activities, needs and subjects of a clinical pharmacy service program in a progressive community hospital. Even after ten years of constant effort, a comprehensive hospital clinical pharmacy program still rquires continual review, changes, and improvements.

New Publication: Work & Role Redesign: Tools and Techniques for the Health Care SettingWork & Role Redesign: Tools and Techniques for the Health Care Setting By HansonRuth Bredlie MS RN and SayersBetty MS. Published by American Hospital Publishing, Inc., Chicago, 1995. ISBN 1-55648-135-7. Paperbound, xv + 197 pp. (28 × 21.5 cm),

fections is organized in sections, including disease, diagnosis, and treatment, that could be the example for all chapters in this section. This chapter also includes some informative tables. The endocarditis chapter has a helpful graphic on pathogenesis, but does not clearly define endocarditis and still recommends minimum bactericidal concentrations and bactericidal titers as tools for the treatment of this disease. There is also less than one page on HIV infections, and the treatment of opportunistic infection is limited to a three-page section. The last chapter of the text on the development and marketing of antimicrobial drugs has an interesting and perhaps useful table on antimicrobial agents on the World Health Organization list of essential drugs. This book was written in the UK and discussed some drugs that are unfamiliar to those of us in the US. I also thoroughly enjoyed the flow of the language. This book does provide a good set of general principles and simple, concise discussions on mechanisms of actions of antimicrobial agents, and introduction to resistance. For practicing pharmacists and physicians, however, a greater in-depth knowledge of antibiotics, diseases, and appropriate treatment is necessary, and is not found in this text. For pharmacists, this information can be better gleaned from texts such as Pharmacotherapy and Applied Therapeutics. It may be an excellent text for allied health professionals who need a working knowledge of antimicrobial chemotherapy without a great deal of specific information on treating patients, or perhaps for students working on particular projects dealing with infectious diseases.