The pharmaceutical profession plays a vital role in delivering high-quality patient care. Today, pharmacists go beyond dispensing medications and offer a wide range of cognitive services to patients. These services include creating personal medication records, developing medication therapy plans, conducting medication use reviews (MUR), performing pharmacotherapy reviews (PTR), providing pharmaceutical interventions, and documenting medication-related problems. These issues can arise at various levels, and it is the pharmacist's responsibility to identify and report them. There are several classifications for categorizing these problems, one of the most prominent being the PCNE classification.
This master's thesis focused on improving the current version of the PCNE classification for medication-related problems through a Delphi study, aimed at achieving consensus among experts. Initially, 30 of the most relevant proposals were identified through multiple iterations based on feedback from the current classification and improvement suggestions made during previous validation rounds. In the Delphi study, we consulted thirty experts, all of whom had previously participated in validating the PCNE classification, to evaluate whether these proposals should be incorporated into the classification. In the first round, the participants accepted 17 out of 30 proposals (56.7%), while the remaining 13 moved on to the second round. The second round showed that group consensus influenced individual opinions, as participants reconsidered their views and agreed on 53.8% (7 out of 13) of the proposals that had not been accepted in the first round. In total, 22 out of 30 proposals were accepted, as the experts unanimously rejected two proposals in the second round. The accepted proposals will form the foundation for an updated version of the PCNE classification.
Through this structured approach, we successfully identified key proposals for improvement and laid the groundwork for an enhanced version of the classification that will be more user-friendly and better aligned with modern healthcare practices.
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