23 June 2015 – 32 people attended a talk entitled ‘Critical Care Pharmacy: FAST HUG in the ICU’ at the International Medical University (IMU), Bukit Jalil Campus. The talk is a joint effort of the Malaysian Pharmaceutical Society-Young Pharmacist Chapter (MPS-YPC) and IMU Alumni. Speaker of the talk, Charlene Tay, shared her experience in Critical Care Pharmacy and some critical components about the FAST HUG with the audience. 
Charlene is a Clinical Pharmacist with special interest in critical care. She who graduated from the IMU BPharm programme in 2010, has been working in a public hospital. Since 2012, she has been working in the general intensive care unit of the General Hospital Kuala Lumpur. Charlene began her talk by briefly introducing the history of Critical Care Pharmacy, which the first ICU is formed since 1930s. She then proceeded to the main topic of the day, which is the FAST HUG in ICU. FAST HUG is devised by Jean-Louis Vincent, and its objective is to provide safe, efficient and effective patient care, besides detecting maximising the pharmaceutical care plan. Charlene also pointed out several critical components in FAST HUG in ICU. She further explained the importance of each element for better patient care. Before she ended the talk, Charlene added on the FAST HUGS BID, where another four elements are introduced: S: Spontaneous Breathing Trial (SBT) – To determine whether the patient should be discontinued of ventilation or not. B: Bowel Care – Routine assessment should be conducted in all critically ill patients I: Indwelling Catheter Removal – Early removal, when these catheters are no longer needed is essential to prevent catheter-associated infection. D: De-escalation of Antibiotics – Broad spectrum antibiotics are usually given first and once the identity of pathogen is confirmed, broad spectrum antibiotics are replaced with effective narrow spectrum antibiotics. 
Charlene also further emphasised the importance of each element in the ‘FAST HUG in ICU’ at the end of the talk. There was a Question and Answer session right after the speaker ended her talk, which opens an opportunity for the audience to clear their doubts. The talk from Charlene was interesting and enlightening as the feedback from most of the participants is quite positive.
The article is written by Enn Yi Thum and Michele Ng, IMU’s Student Ambassadors.
