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Correspondence to Stephanie Kohl, Policy & Advocacy, European Association of Hospital Pharmacists, Brussels 1200, Belgium; [email protected]
EAHP Position Paper on Pharmacy Preparations and Compounding
Making a difference in medication by delivering tailor-made medicines for the benefit of patients
The patient-oriented preparation of medicines is anchored deeply in pharmacy practice. Since the establishment of the profession, hospital pharmacies have manufactured, prepared and compounded medicines to adequately respond to patient needs, especially for those individual patients or patient groups whose medical requirements cannot be met by industrially manufactured medicines. 1
The term ‘compounding’2 is frequently used in the English speaking literature, while in continental Europe the term ‘pharmacy preparation’3 is mainly applied. This position paper regards both the term ‘pharmacy preparation’ and the term ‘compounding’ as interchangeable but will mainly refer to ‘compounding’. Another process related to preparation is ‘reconstitution’.4 This process is not necessarily confined to a pharmacy. Reconstitution entails, for example, adding a diluent to a powdered medication to prepare a solution or suspension.
Due to the shift towards personalised medicines, including advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs), the strain on national healthcare budgets and medicines shortages, compounding has regained significance in Europe. The position paper of the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP) aims at providing information about this practice in hospitals and asks for a stronger embedment of compounding and reconstitution practices in European hospital pharmacies, linked to increasing capacity and training.
To further enhance patient care in Europe, EAHP
calls on health systems to create an environment which enables the provision of compounding services by hospital pharmacists based on the European Statements of Hospital Pharmacy;
encourages health authorities to facilitate the delivery of pharmacy preparations between hospitals and to invest in compounding services, since only by building sufficient capacity will hospitals be equipped to better respond to patient needs and extraordinary situations like pandemics and shortages of essential medicines;
recommends the revision of pharmacy curricula and the expansion of training opportunities for the pharmacy workforce to account for the growing demand for pharmacy preparations;
encourages the appointment of a hospital pharmacist as a designated person in every hospital, advocates for the increased involvement of hospital pharmacies in reconstitution practices, through setting up procedures and training personnel, and promotes the creation of centralised reconstitution...