Beijing hospitals to launch pharmacy counseling

Beijing hospitals will set up counseling rooms to help people take their medicine correctly, Bian Baosheng, a deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Hospitals, said on Thursday.

Bian made the remarks at Beijing Anzhen Hospital, where workers from other hospitals were invited to visit the hospital's counseling room.

Set up in 1998, the counseling room at Anzhen Hospital has eight pharmacists, who instruct people on how to take prescribed medicines.

People who don't feel well after taking the medicine, who are pregnant, who need to take medicine for a long time or who need to take several kinds of medicine at the same time are all encouraged to consult the pharmacists, as doctors who write the prescriptions may be too busy to give detailed instructions.

The counseling room provides the service for free, and also helps people who are not patients at the hospital but want professional guidance, said Zheng Qingmin, a pharmacist at the hospital.

The pharmacists also record cases of adverse drug reaction and report them to the city's authorities, she said.

A national survey conducted in 2012 showed that only 6.3 percent of those who took an online test consisting of 10 questions on medicine use answered all correctly.

The need to improve people's knowledge of how to correctly take medicine emphasizes the importance of pharmacists, and all 21 hospitals under the Beijing Municipal Administration of Hospitals should set up their own counseling rooms by the end of September, Bian said.