Regular consultations with pharmacist Katja Naunton-Boom are helping to keep Betty Cox out of hospital and in her own home.
Following a stroke eight months ago, Mrs Cox, 80, takes 15 doses of various medications every day.
Although active and mentally sharp, Mrs Cox said that since the stroke, "I still get a bit dizzy and confused at times."
Advice from Mrs Naunton-Boom has helped Mrs Cox improve the way she manages her medications.
"Otherwise I mess them up if I'm having a bad day. I was just taking them out of the packet and Katja got me putting them into the [Webster Pack] for the whole week,'' Mrs Cox said.
The medication reviews Mrs Naunton-Boom does in general practices, pharmacies and patients' homes go beyond giving advice on when to take medicines and how to sort them into packs. She also checks for unusual symptoms and whether patients are taking the right amounts of the right medications.
"Checking the list the doctor has of what they think the patients is taking and then what they're actually taking is really important," Mrs Naunton-Boom said.
In some instances communication errors can lead to a GP being unaware of medications a specialist has prescribed and vice versa. Some patients inadvertently take double doses due to the same medication being sold under different brand names.
Medicine-related harm is the estimated cause of 650,000 Australian hospital and emergency department visits each year.
A review by University of Canberra academics Associate Professor Itismita Mohanty and Professor Theo Niyonsenga has found that pharmacist-led interventions could reduce the cost of unplanned hospital re-admissions by between $140 million and $315 million annually.
Community pharmacists, however, are limited to completing a maximum of 30 home medication reviews per month.
Mrs Naunton-Boom's husband Mark Naunton is a professor of pharmacy at the University of Canberra and president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, which wants pharmacists to be able to do more home medication reviews.
"Probably 50 per cent of medication-related hospitalisations can prevented through a little bit more care and attention from people that know things about medicines," Professor Naunton said.
"It could be the home medicine review. It could be the pharmacist in the general practice. It doesn't always have to be a pharmacist, but someone looking at medicines would go somewhere to reducing the harm and the cost associated with medicines that result and hospitalisation for some people."
