Author: Peter

Having spent 10 years toiling as a pharmacist under roughly two dozen managers, I know two facts to be true: Our society rewards good work with more work, and great worker bees do not necessarily make effective managers. If you’ve been a staff pharmacist for any length of time, you are likely to be familiar with the Peter Principle, the concept that individuals are promoted until they reach the level of their incompetence.

By performing medication reconciliation across the care continuum, pharmacists play an essential role in preventing medication errors during transitions of care. Pharmacy professors from the Lloyd L. Gregory School of Pharmacy at Palm Beach Atlantic University recently detailed the most common causes of medication errors during care transitions and described the pharmacists’ role in mitigating them.

The challenge of retaining and recruiting enough teachers to staff Clark County School District classrooms is about to become even more difficult. The health plan that covers thousands of teachers and their families, which has been insolvent for years, is on the verge of collapse.

Pharma marketers are closely watching Amarin's  lawsuit demanding the right to talk up the off-label uses for its cardiovascular drug Vascepa. After all, if the legal attack against FDA regulations succeeds, that gives credence to drugmakers' free speech argument--and could open up new worlds of drug promotion.

As a third-year pharmacy student doing a public health rotation with Pharmacy Planning Services, Inc. and the Marin County Pharmacists Association, I was assigned a trial project: to determine whether making lockboxes for prescription medications available in pharmacies would deter use of drugs by those for whom they were not intended.

When the FDA turns away a potential new treatment, it sends the drug's maker what's called a complete response letter, detailing all the deficiencies that led to the rejection. Those forms aren't public, but most companies issue press releases describing their contents. However, as a new study reveals, there's often a wide gap between the FDA's actual issues and the sponsors' spin.

Researchers have known for years just how sketchy preclinical biomedical research can be. Reports on research projects that can capture headlines around the world are also not infrequently impossible to reproduce. And now a new study has attempted to put a dollar figure on the amount of research produced in the U.S. each year that can't be reproduced.

Indeed, the institutional, financial, sectional and political hurdles were many. But Sandoval understands what many have said for years: In order for Las Vegas to evolve, it needs better health care.

An official formulation of nasal naloxone for reversing opioid overdoses that doesn't have to be used off-label may be on the market soon. Lightlake Therapeutics has opened a rolling submission of the NDA for its nasal naloxone to the FDA, according to a release from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is partnering with the company to develop the drug.

If Merck has answers regarding the efficacy of its mumps vaccine, it's not being forthright, says a letter filed by an attorney representing two former Merck virologists who are now whistleblowers. Originally filed in 2010, the suit claims that the pharma giant skewed the tests of its U.S.-exclusive mumps vaccine by adding animal antibodies to blood samples, resulting in 95% efficacy that kept competitors--who couldn't match the efficacy--off the market.