ACCESS TO HEALTH DATA BY PHARMACISTS AMBASSADOR: CAROLINA SIMÃO APEF, PORTUGAL
According to the guidelines on Good Pharmacy Practice Standards for Quality of Pharmacy Services, developed jointly by the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), ''Pharmacists should have access to, contribute to and use all necessary clinical and patient data to coordinate effective medication therapy management, especially when multiple health-care are involved in the patient's medication therapy, and intervene if necessary''. [1] Additionally, the FIP recommends in its eighth development objective entitled ''Working with Others'', the need to continue and integrate care through communication systems, data sharing, co-decision, and co-accountability, [2] in order to contribute to the development of health care of better quality and centred on the patient. On the legislative scope, in Portugal, access to health data by health professionals is facilitated. This is necessary as a way to promote more and better health care to the population. Thus, safeguarding access to data only by professionals who have a duty of professional secrecy, such as pharmacists. [3] Evidence points to the need to share health data with Pharmacists at different levels of patient care, however, in Portugal, this is not always the case. Community Pharmacists, as community outreach professionals, still do not have access to users' health data, therefore, are prevented from making decisions based on accurate and complete information. This limitation hinders the work of the professionals, who are often the user's first contact with health care, reducing the quality of counselling and monitoring of the user's medication. The Portuguese Pharmacists' Association and the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS), in 2019, signed an agreement defining the access of Hospital Pharmacists to the electronic clinical record of users of the National Health System. [4] This was an important step and is now also required for other areas of action such as Community Pharmacies. Why is it so important for Community Pharmacists to have access to health data? In Portugal, a large percentage of the population is polymedicated. A European study called SYMPATHY, which involved the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Coimbra and Lisbon, and which aimed to study the impact of polymedication on the elderly population, estimates that 40% of people who are polymedicated do not do it properly [5], This leads to a high percentage of hospitalizations and health complications that could be avoided. The access by the Community Pharmacists to the patient's health data and to the medication that they administers would be useful information that allows the professionals to understand if the dispensing of the medication requested by the user was safe and, in the last case, act on drug-drug or drug-pathology interactions.
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