Applying micro-costing methods to estimate the costs of pharmacy interventions: An illustration using multi-professional clinical medication reviews in care homes for older people

Sach, Tracey H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8098-9220, Desborough, James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5807-1731, Houghton, Julie and Holland, Richard and CAREMED study team (2015) Applying micro-costing methods to estimate the costs of pharmacy interventions: An illustration using multi-professional clinical medication reviews in care homes for older people. International Journal of Pharmacy Practice, 23 (4). 237–247. ISSN 0961-7671

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Abstract

Objectives Economic methods are underutilised within pharmacy research resulting in a lack of quality evidence to support funding decisions for pharmacy interventions. The aim of this study is to illustrate the methods of micro-costing within the pharmacy context in order to raise awareness and use of this approach in pharmacy research. Methods Micro-costing methods are particularly useful where a new service or intervention is being evaluated and for which no previous estimates of the costs of providing the service exist. This paper describes the rationale for undertaking a micro-costing study before detailing and illustrating the process involved. The illustration relates to a recently completed trial of multi-professional medication reviews as an intervention provided in care homes. All costs are presented in UK£2012. Key findings In general, costing methods involve three broad steps (identification, measurement and valuation); when using micro-costing, closer attention to detail is required within all three stages of this process. The mean (standard deviation; 95% confidence interval (CI) ) cost per resident of the multi-professional medication review intervention was £104.80 (50.91; 98.72 to 109.45), such that the overall cost of providing the intervention to all intervention home residents was £36,221.29 (95% CI, 32 810.81 to 39 631.77). Conclusions This study has demonstrated that micro-costing can be a useful method, not only for estimating the cost of a pharmacy intervention to feed into a pharmacy economic evaluation, but also as a source of information to help inform those designing pharmacy services about the potential time and costs involved in delivering such services.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	bottom-up costing,micro-costing,older people,pharmacy,pharmaceutical science,health policy,public health, environmental and occupational health,pharmacy,sdg 3 - good health and well-being ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3000/3003
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School Faculty of Science > School of Pharmacy Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Health Sciences
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	18 Nov 2014 15:28
Last Modified:	18 May 2023 00:05
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/51062
DOI:	10.1111/ijpp.12162

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