A handful of prescription pills may seem like a simple solution to controlling a health issue, but it actually increases dangerous health risks.
Patients leaving the doctor’s office with a stack of prescriptions think they are on their way to healthy living. However, taking multiple medications to manage a health issue, also called polypharmacy, is a rising epidemic that causes significant health damage.
By releasing a detailed infographic, CEUfast aims to inform the public about the dangers of over medication, as well as educate medical professionals through an online course.
CEUfast Lead Nurse Planner and CEO Julia Tortorice wanted to draw attention to polypharmacy specifically in older patients.
“We wanted to raise awareness of the dangers about the increasingly frequent problem of polypharmacy in the elderly” Tortorice said.
Illustrating the dangers of polypharmacy, the infographic includes several statistics.
Elderly patients taking five or more daily medications are at an 80 percent risk for of experiencing side effects from the drugs reacting to each other.
About 15 to 40 percent of elderly patients experience drug on drug interactions.
Adverse drug reactions can end up in a trip to the hospital. In fact, about 5 to 7 percent of annual hospitalizations are from adverse drug reactions.
Sometimes those incidents are deadly. Adverse drug interactions lead to 140,000 fatalities every year.
But all of this can be prevented when healthcare professionals practice the proper steps and precautions.
Nurses can learn how to identify early signs by taking the CEUfast 3 credit hour course Polypharmacy: Is it the new normal for the elderly patient?
Upon completion of the self-paced course, nurses will understand the dangers of polypharmacy and how they can prevent the problem.
CEUfast, Inc. is an accredited provider of continuing nursing education by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.
