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Improving patient care today: more timely care and expanded roles of pharmacists

step in this process is to understand the patient perspective. This can probably not be done using regular questionnaire methodology due to the sensitivity of the issue, and also because it is hard to pose direct questions to patients about stopping any of their drugs. In addition, it is necessary to understand how polymedicated patients feel about their ‘drug soup’ before starting the process of teasing out what could, in their minds, be omitted from the mix. Therefore, other methods that better gauge the patient’s as well as clinician’s ideas are available to pharmacy practice researchers. Qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and focus groups are gaining momentum as appropriate methods used within pharmacy practice when knowledge is sought about the patient perspective and sensitive clinical issues. Another use of the methods palette is to use a quasiexperimental design with data that the organisation (i.e. hospital) already collects for clinical and administrative reasons. Such clever use of methods can be seen in this issue in the study by Metcalfe et al. addressing the impact of the introduction of computerised physician order entry (CPOE) on the surveillance of restricted antimicrobials and compliance with policy. Here the authors examine the inpatient chart before the introduction of the CPOE, the CPOE with the antimicrobial approval system, and then the CPOE alone – depending on which data was available in each time period. In a similar vein, the study by McInerney et al. of pharmacist interventions at an outpatient chemotherapy clinic used audits done at two separate times to investigate whether a new integrated cancer centre improved pharmacists’ impact. The research within the area of medication errors is developing and it is important now to turn from counting reported incidents to using the pharmacist gaze to count and describe opportunities for error, as Foo et al. report in this issue. Having pharmacists observe the medication process from prescribing to administration is very valuable. It is quite certain that pharmacists’ knowledge and skills make them able to detect potential medication errors from a process-oriented viewpoint. Being focused on patient harm from medication errors is important, but the learning that can be gained by understanding the quality of the process of how an error occurs is of great value for organisations. Here pharmacists can play an important role and it would be of interest to study this issue in other types of medicine distribution systems than the one at the Singaporean hospital described in this issue. It is encouraging to see the breadth of the designs and methods used by researchers publishing in JPPR and the hope is that the studies will become even more varied in these parameters, as researchers will have an increasing number of choices with the emergence of big and complex data sets, wide use of electronic health records, and a myriad of mixed methodologies.