Impacting cardiovascular disease risk management

Abstract

Through their expertise on medications, pharmacists are in a position to assist patients with medication counselling and can play a significant intervention in the prevention of cardiovascular disease risk. Several studies demonstrated the importance of the pharmacist’s intervention in the management of patients with chronic disease, in particular diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidaemia and cardiovascular disease. Disease management may be described as ‘managed care’, a term applied to describe care provided by healthcare professionals, which may be modified in order to obtain beneficial outcomes, in terms of both clinical and financial aspects. Disease management programmes are frequently undertaken for specific diseases, reasons being the cost of medications, clinical outcome measures, and different practices for managing and treating the disease. Such diseases include diabetes, cardiovascular disease and asthma.