INTERNSHIP IN INDRAPRASTHA APOLLO HOSPITAL, NEW DELHI

Mary Raju Mathew, Sharanya Nair,Pharm.D Intern

In our final year of Pharm.D, it was a valuable experience to have  been able to do our internship in Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, New Delhi and get to know how clinical pharmacists in India work about.  IAH is the first hospital, in India, to be accredited by the JCI (Joint Commission International). As medicine management is mandatory for JCI accredited hospitals, they have a clinical pharmacy practice depatment which carries out activities that includes prescription audit, where a pharmacist goes daily and checks the patient file in their assigned floor. A pharmacist gets to audit around 30 patients at the minimum in a day.  The pharmacist verifies whether the drug, its dosage form, dose, frequency, route of administration, administration time and counter signs the medication chart. Any errors identified are informed to the physician and changes are made. They also verify the medicine indents, before they are dispensed to the patient from the pharmacy.  During our three month internship time, we were posted in the oncology, paediatrics and orthopaedics department and were allowed to shadow the clinical pharmacists during their rounds.  The hospital has been enlisted as an ADR monitoring centre under the PvPI (Pharmacovigilance Programme of India) by the IPC (Indian Pharmacopeia Commission), hence the reported ADR reports are send to IPC through software called VigiFlow®. They have a 24/7 Drug Information Centre, where they receive around 500 telephone queries in a day. Mostly physicians call to query about the drugs before prescribing and even nurses call to enquire about a medicine during indenting.  The Out Patient counselling service they provide is quite notable. A large number of patients are benefited from the OP counselling desk, located in a space next to the OP pharmacy. The patients are also allowed to buy their medicines from outside the hospital, and the medicines they bring from outside is again approved and managed by the clinical pharmacist. During our internship in Delhi, we also visited the IPC in Gaziabad, the centre of ADR monitoring and reporting in India.

 It was an incredible experience and we could really get an insight into how pharmacists of our nation can prove serviceable in the clinical scenario