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.... the House Calls program at Virginia Commonwealth University this year implemented a new benefit for some medically complex patients: an in-home consultation with a pharmacist. .......when visiting patients in their homes consists largely of "kitchen table" medication reconciliation and teaching patients and their families about their medicines.

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.

Various pharmacy segments have recently been focusing their attention on what they can do to reduce avoidable readmissions of patients to hospitals, including improving the discharge process. Preventable hospital readmissions currently cost the US health system an estimated $25 billion annually. Pharmacists in different settings can play an important role in reducing these avoidable readmissions, especially if they learn to coordinate their efforts and collaborate.

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.

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.