Measures Required To Contain Risks
RAMADAN is a month of fasting for Muslims. As it involves drastic changes in eating times, there are issues that diabetics planning to fast have to bear in mind. Dr Nadine Halawa, Clinical Pharmacology Department Head at Dasman Diabetes Institute, in this interview to the Arab Times discusses at length the various risks involved in fasting for diabetics and what measures they have to adopt to fast in a safe and healthy manner.Question: You are a pharmacotherapist. What’s that exactly?
Answer: I have a pharmacy degree, which is someone who is trained in optimizing the medication management of the patient to ensure that it is safe, effective and also cost effective. So you have to manage the patient’s regimen as a whole, and also work on managing various diseases in collaboration with doctors. It’s a new field and is not currently present in Kuwait. But it’s catching up in the region, Saudi Arabia now has a clinical pharmacist, the University here has approved pharmacy programs. So Kuwait is kind of next in line.
Q: Well that is what you must be doing here in Dasman Diabetes Institute also. But can you tell us more about the nature of your job here, with respect to diabetic patients?
A: What we started here in Dasman is a pharmacy therapy clinic. We see patients that meet a certain criteria, primarily people that are older, over 60 years of age, and people that are on five or more medications, all those who have a new medication added to their regimen can come to our clinic. What happens is that we do a comprehensive medication review. So we ask patients to come to the clinic bringing all their medication or lists of medication that they have and we go through a systematic process; I have my staff here who take care of that.
First we study the list of medication, why they are taking it and how they are taking it, because there is a lot of mixed information out there. We do a drug interaction check on all the medication. Then we systematically try to identify any drug related problems that are occurring. This usually comes from looking at the regimen and talking to the patient about how they are taking the drugs and what they are taking it for, so that we know if there are any problems. Usually we see many types of problems of people taking too much of a dose or people taking the same drug but different brand names and they don’t know.
