Last week, the University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine held a symposium focused on issues impacting caregivers, during which, BTPM NPR's Emyle Watkins had the chance to sit down with Robert Wahler. Wahler was one of the presenters and is a pharmacy professor who co-leads Team Alice. Team Alice focuses on reducing what many people would call “medication errors,” especially in older adults. Here’s part of our conversation on how those mistakes happen and how to reduce your risk.
TRANSCRIPT
Emyle Watkins: Hi, I am Emyle Watkins, and this is the Disabilities Beat. Last week, the University at Buffalo, Jacobs School of Medicine, held a symposium focused on issues impacting caregivers, during which I had the chance to sit down with Robert Wahler.
Wahler was one of the presenters, and is a pharmacy professor who co-leads Team Alice. Team Alice focuses on reducing what many people would call medication errors, especially in older adults. Here's part of our conversation on how those mistakes happen and how to reduce your risk.
Emyle Watkins: Do we have any understanding of the prevalence of this issue of medication errors?
Robert Wahler: I'd almost frame it, instead of errors, because often people think of errors as, they gave me the wrong medicine-type thing, to prescribing inappropriately, and the prevalence is actually really high. So the criteria that I talked about is called the Beers Criteria. It's been around since the late '80s, and they've done surveys for years in different populations, nursing home populations, community, et cetera.
And unfortunately what we found is that, what we call the prevalence of the problem has stayed the same even though we've known about this for decades now, at somewhere between 35 and 45% of people in those populations being prescribed at least one of those potentially inappropriate medications.
Emyle Watkins: And for people who aren't familiar, why does this happen? Why is this so prevalent?
Robert Wahler: That's a really good question, the why. We look at it sometimes as education on the side of providers, those writing the scripts for the medication. That's one area. The other areas that people have, have need for these medications perhaps earlier in life, but as they age, those drugs never get stopped. And that's one of the areas of research. It's like when starting a medication as a provider, you should inform the patient that at some point we should be looking at stopping this, and that doesn't always occur.
Emyle Watkins: What are some things they can do as caregivers to be mindful of this issue, or to advocate for their loved one, or advocate for themselves?
Robert Wahler: There's a number of things to do, and I'd mentioned during the panel that first and foremost, get that medication list. Find out what's on there. And then you can use a number of different resources. The American Geriatric Society is the gatekeeper of the Beers Criteria. So you can go to their website and find that list of medications and see, "Is anything on my loved one's list on here?"
And then it's a why, because the important part is, these are potentially inappropriate. They may be, they may not be. So it's then to have that discussed and say, "Okay, I've targeted this medication. This might be bad. Let's talk with your provider why?" And that's one of the programs that we've developed. We call it the Team Alice Medication, Safety and Empowerment Curriculum.
And that's the one that we're rolling out in senior centers, not only to let caregivers and patients themselves know about the potential safety issues of medications, but then what to do about how to advocate for themselves on a visit with their provider. And that's the one that we're rolling out through some of the senior centers in Erie and Niagara County. It's a pilot project right now. We hope to be able to take it countywide in both counties.
Emyle Watkins: I mean, do you think this also speaks to larger issues in the healthcare system that need to be fixed in order for patients to have care where we don't run into these issues?
Robert Wahler: No, most definitely. As we look at what we do about medication safety, we've identified patient and caregiver factors, provider factors, but then also system factors. And it's not just the healthcare system. It's the insurance. It's all of those systems. And, yes, there's fragmentation in those systems. So it's actually an area that we're looking at.
We've got some folks in computer science here at UB, computer science health factors engineering that we're working with to identify, what are some of the system ways that we can approach this? We just wrote a grant on incorporating artificial intelligence into using all this data out there. Can we create things that prevent this fragmentation in the system? So that's the next thing out there.
Emyle Watkins: You can listen to the Disabilities Beat segment on demand, view a transcript in plain language description for every episode on our website at btpm.org.
I'm Emyle Watkins. Thanks for listening.
