Medications for Individuals With Visual Impairment: Development and Content Assessment of a Medication Decision Support Tool.

OBJECTIVE

Many medications can cause ocular adverse drug events that interfere with visual function. In individuals with pre-existing visual impairment, this necessitates heightened vigilance to ensure safe and appropriate management. In addition, some pharmaceutical dosage forms are challenging for these patients to utilise. The objective was to develop a medication decision support tool and assess its content to assist in the prescription and dispensation of medications for individuals living with visual impairment.

METHODS

An analysis of the Summary of Product Characteristics and a literature search were performed to identify high-risk medications and complex dosage forms for individuals with visual impairment. A medication decision support tool was created, and a Delphi survey for consensus building was conducted by a French-speaking European panel of experts. The experts were invited to indicate their degree of agreement on a Likert scale and descriptive statistics were produced using IBM SPSS software. This process was repeated until a consensus was reached between all experts.

RESULTS

Initially, 744 medications were included in the tool, that is, 40.5% of the medications marketed in Belgium. The tool was divided into 2 parts: Part 1 is related to high-risk medications while Part 2 is focused to pharmaceutical dosage forms. Four rounds of the Delphi method were necessary to the panel of 9 experts to evaluate the tool. Ultimately, 836 compounds were included in the tool, that is, 45.4% of the medications marketed in Belgium.

CONCLUSION

The consensus process ensured a consolidated and relevant tool for disseminating high-quality content to Belgian community pharmacists and physicians. Although the analysis focused on medications marketed in Belgium, it is evident that many of these are also utilized in other European countries, thereby indicating that the approach may hold relevance beyond the Belgian context.