21 April 2015 – IMU’s School of Pharmacy and IMU Alumni hosted a talk entitled Home Medication Review (HMR) – The Beneficial Domiciliary Service for Elderly Patients at IMU campus in Bukit Jalil. The talk was also supported by the Malaysian Pharmaceutical Society-Young Pharmacist Chapter (MPS-YPC). The speaker for this talk was Jacqueline Wong Hui Yi, who is a registered pharmacist with the Pharmacy Board of Malaysia. She graduated from the IMU MPharm programme in 2009 and is currently a geriatric pharmacist at Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL). Prior to this, Ms Jacqueline was working in Kedah for 3 years after completing her training as a Provisionally Registered Pharmacist (PRP). She was transferred back to HKL in 2012 and has since been practicing here. After 2 years, she was working in the geriatric ward and is now in-charge of the HMR programme. She is actively involved in the Geriatric MTAC and the Home Medication Review (HMR) Programmes due to her passion and interest in geriatrics. The HMR programme aims to educate, help and guide elderly patients to correctly consume their medications in the comfort of their own homes. In other words, the programme serves as a platform to ensure the optimal and quality use of medication by the elderly patients in their homes. 
Jacqueline shared some background on the home medication review programme and its incorporation into geriatric pharmacy. She shared that there were many elderly patients who were living by themselves and experienced trouble consuming their medications correctly. Hence, the home medication review programme was implemented to help the elderly patients take their medications as per their dosage regimen. Older people often experience poor eyesight and poor memory. Due to these reasons, they might not remember when or how to take the medications as instructed by the pharmacists. They also store their medications incorrectly as well, and this could lead to decreased efficacy of the drugs to the symptoms of their ailments. 
Jacqueline and her team, which comprises of physiotherapists, doctors and nurses, will pay a visit to the home of the elderly patients and guide them on how to take the medications. Each visit takes about four hours, of which the workload in these four hours are shared among all of them, with the physiotherapist teaching the elderly patients some exercise, so on and so forth. At times during the home visits, Jacqueline finds expired medications and the inappropriate storage of the medications. However, due to the large number of elderly patients in Malaysia, it is not possible to include all of them. Therefore, only the elderly patients who meet the criteria will be included in the HMR programme. The speaker also shared about the challenges her team faced while managing this HMR programme as well as their solutions on overcoming these challenges. Through this HMR programme, Jacqueline and her team hopes to continue reaching out to the elderly patients and ensure that they take their medications correctly and regularly to maximise the therapeutic effect. Feedback from participant:
“To me, it helps to give a deeper insight of specific geriatric care that is currently happening in Malaysia which is a good thing as not many people are aware of it, and as a pharmacist, being able to serve the patients in a compassionate and creative way is something to be learned and practiced by all pharmacists as well as other healthcare professionals. As the saying goes old is gold, and our elderly patients deserves the care and help from the society.”
The talk ended with the MPS-YPC president, Mr Lim Shi Hao presenting a certificate of appreciation to our guest speaker Ms Jacqueline, for all her effort and valuable input for the talk.
