Pharmacist prescribers improve blood pressure in hypertensive patients

There is growing recognition that community pharmacists are well-placed to help manage patients with hypertension. In the image, a pharmacist takes an elderly woman's blood pressure — Patients were more likely to achieve their target blood pressure if their care was managed by pharmacists

There is growing recognition that community pharmacists are well-placed to help manage patients with hypertension. Support for this approach comes from the Alberta Clinical Trial in Optimizing Hypertension (RxACTION), a randomised controlled trial involving 248 adults with above-target blood pressure (BP).

Results published in Circulation
^[1] (online, 10 June 2015) reveal that patients whose BP was managed by a community pharmacist had an average 18.3mmHg reduction in systolic BP over the six-month study period, versus 11.8mmHg in patients who received usual care (P=0.0006). Pharmacist-managed patients were also twice as likely to achieve their target BP as control patients.

“Policymakers should consider an expanded role for pharmacists, including prescribing, to address the burden of hypertension,” the investigators conclude.