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A Pharmacist’s Role in Hospice Care By Margaret Chan The RAMPS program gave me the wonderful opportunity to meet an ambitious pharmacist with a unique role as a medication consultant in a hospice program. Being paired with Dr. Vicky Ferraresi has exposed me to a non-traditional role for the pharmacist. Dr. Vicky Ferraresi is a pharmacist at Pathways Home Health and Hospice. When I arrived at my first meeting, I arrived at one of three Pathways offices in the Bay Area. I was surprised to see no patients at all. Instead, I was greeted with a very business-like corporate office setting. After touring the facility with my mentor and one of the specialty pharmacy residents, we all attended my first ever Pharmacy & Therapeutics (P&T) meeting, run by Dr. Ferraresi. During the meeting, we discussed how to improve medication prescribing practices from physicians and how to decrease medication administration errors by the hospice nurses. In particular, we discussed how to revise and improve a common form that is used by both physicians and nurses. The group discussed how modifications might make this form easier to read by everyone. This unique experience exposed me to how pharmacists act as an integral part of a team that runs a hospice and palliative care program for hundreds of patients. After the meeting, I realized that pharmacists can contribute so much more than just clinical knowledge. They are trained to provide excellent administrative and leadership skills as well. Following the meeting, we attended another meeting called the “team” meeting. At this meeting, nurses, physicians, pharmacists and social workers from the Oakland, South San Francisco and Sunnyvale locations discussed each hospice patient enrolled in their program. For each patient, there was a medication review, discussion of family situations and a health status update. Again, this meeting showed me how palliative and end-of-life care must rely on a team of healthcare professionals including the pharmacist, who is the primary pain medication specialist. During the meeting, I noticed how every person in the room looked to the pharmacist for suggestions about changes in the patients’ medications. As I sat there in the room, full of doctors, nurses and social workers, I felt a sense of pride wash over me, knowing that there was only one pharmacist. At that moment, I knew that being a pharmacist would be something special.
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