Guidelines on Assistive Products Useful in Pharmacy Practice to Optimize and Ensure Medication Use by Individuals...

Visual impairment represents a significant public health challenge that can affect patients ability to accurately identify medications and access essential information about them. A potential solution to address these difficulties is the utilization of assistive products. Consequently, guidelines have been developed in French for Belgian community pharmacists to enhance the safety of individuals with a visual impairment when utilizing medications.

To build an interdisciplinary consensus on guidelines for the utilization of assistive products in pharmacy practice, with the aim of ensuring the safe administration of medications by individuals with a visual impairment.

A Delphi survey for consensus building was conducted by a national panel of experts. The interdisciplinary panel was constituted of ophthalmologists with a specialization in low vision, orthoptists, ergotherapists, psychologists, and community pharmacists. The recommendations were encoded in the form of an online questionnaire and the experts were invited to indicate their degree of agreement on a 9-point Likert scale. Descriptive statistics were produced using IBM SPSS 27 software. This process was repeated until a consensus was reached between all the experts.

Four rounds of the Delphi method were necessary to the panel of 10 experts to evaluate the 47 recommendations initially submitted. Ultimately, an introduction to the guidelines and 39 recommendations, grouped into six main categories, were validated.

The consensus process has enabled us to obtain consolidated recommendations and to ensure their relevance, thus facilitating the dissemination of high-quality content to community pharmacists practising their profession in Belgian pharmacies.