Introduction
Since a novel coronavirus has caused worldwide outbreak of COVID-19. The spectrum of COVID-19 ranges from mild to severe and even death1-4. Up to now, more than 80% of the confirmed cases of COVID-19 are mild or common illness. Currently there are no specific antiviral treatment for COVID-195-7. The World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared the coronavirus a global pandemic.
Since the SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious, in order to control the spread of the epidemic, Fangcang hospitals were established as a new major public health facility, which had large space, multiple beds and possessed multiple functions, including emergency treatment, clinical examination and centralized management8-10. Until Feb.24th, 2020, there have been 16 Fangcang hospitals established for more than 12,000 patients with mild and common COVID-19 in China. As a requisite functional module of the Fangcang hospital, the Fangcang pharmacy and clinical pharmacists also played an important role in ensuring the supply and safety of therapeutic drugs for the COVID-19 patients9.
As the largest Fangcang hospital, Jianghan Fangcang Hospital was the first one to open up for mild/ moderate COVID-19 patients, which provided about 1500 beds. Most of the patients had no obvious clinical symptoms or had mild symptoms after they were hospitalized. Common respiratory symptoms include fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath. A few patients were accompanied with nasal obstruction, running nose, pharyngalgia, myalgia and diarrhea. The therapeutic regimen was simple and mainly included antiviral and symptomatic treatment. However, the large number and complicated sources of patients with mental stress and comorbidities, make the treatment more complicated and difficult. There were also many special patients, such as child, pregnant and senile ones resulting in a great difficulty of treatment assignment.
The standard treatment for patients in the Fangcang hospitals included, as necessary, antiviral agents, traditional Chinese medicines, immunomodulator, glucocorticoid, intestinal microecological modulators etc. And other medicines for chronic diseases. Under this circumstance, there are many drug related problems such as drug interventions, drug interactions and adverse drug reactions, which lead to high risks of drug safety in COVID-19 patients, especially for those special patients. Therefore, it’s important to carry out monitoring of drug therapeutic effect and adverse reactions, for timely guiding medical workers and patients to use drugs rationally, provide relevant drug consultation.
This study was a retrospective study on the benefit of pharmaceutical care for patients in Jianghan Fangcang Hospital. Data were collected from medical records, patient questionnaire and WeChat® online service records. After 35 days’ pharmaceutical care, clinical pharmacist help 349 patients solved about 196 different questions concluded in this paper. The satisfaction with patients was assessed through discharged patients’ questionnaire.