Health needs assessment in patients assisted by a pharmaceutical non-profit charitable organisation: a preliminary pharmacoepidemiological survey based on the analysis of drug dispensation within Italy's Banco Farmaceutico

Submitted: 11 February 2015
Accepted: 20 April 2015
Published: 12 June 2015
Abstract Views: 1784
PDF: 873
HTML: 418
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Authors

We performed a health needs assessment of the vulnerable population cared for by the Banco Farmaceutico, an Italian nonprofit charitable organization that supplies medicines for many centers belonging to different charities. Drugs dispensed in the first half of 2014 by a representative sample of these centers were examined. An independently conducted telephone interview on our centers complemented this data. Adult males and migrants constituted the majority of the user population, and the most dispensed drugs were those for the respiratory system. Of all patients, 40% presented with a chronic problem and more than half needed polypharmacy. Users seek help spontaneously in 70% of the cases, with the centers being able to meet 80% of the existing demand. Patients that could not be managed were referred to local hospitals or collaborating doctors and reasons were explored. We believe our study to be a first attempt to characterise a growing population that is also increasingly represented in emergency departments and internal medicine wards. It is also an evaluation of the quality of data collected by charitable institutions, highlighting a significant need for improvement as they could be the only basis to monitor the health needs of this type of population.

Dimensions

Altmetric

PlumX Metrics

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

PlumX Metrics

PlumX Metrics  provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and many more) in the online environment. Examples include, when research is mentioned in the news or is tweeted about. Collectively known as PlumX Metrics, these metrics are divided into five categories to help make sense of the huge amounts of data involved and to enable analysis by comparing like with like.

Citations

Silvano G. Cella, Department of Clinical Sciences and Community Health, University of Milano
Department of Clinical Sciences and Community Health

How to Cite

Bini, S., Rigamonti, A. E., Fiorini, F., Bertazzi, P. A., Fiorini, G. F., & Cella, S. G. (2015). Health needs assessment in patients assisted by a pharmaceutical non-profit charitable organisation: a preliminary pharmacoepidemiological survey based on the analysis of drug dispensation within Italy’s Banco Farmaceutico. Italian Journal of Medicine, 10(2), 111–118. https://doi.org/10.4081/itjm.2015.590