The paucity of well-designed studies, flawed methodology and inadequate reporting in many papers make conclusions hard to draw. Conclusive evidence that SAPs improve compliance was not provided. Although patients participating in SAPs make errors, small numbers of patients are often responsible for a large number of errors. Whilst most studies suggest that SAPs increase patient's knowledge in part, it is difficult to separate out the effect of the educational component of many SAPs. Most patients who participated in SAPs were satisfied with their care and many would choose to take part in a SAP in the future. No studies measured the total resource requirement of implementing and maintaining a SAP.

Pharmacist-led monitoring in a typical NHS hospital setting was effective at detecting ADRs in newly marketed drugs. However, this effort might have been substantially less time-consuming and more effective were electronic patient records (EPRs) available. Pharmacy computer systems are not designed to be patient focused and are therefore unable to identify patients taking newly marketed drugs. It is argued that future EPR and computerised patient-specific prescribing systems should be designed to capture this data in the same way as some US systems are currently able to do.

No abstract