Authors’ reply

Dear Editor,

We appreciated reading the letter to the editor concerning our publication “Hospital discharge: What are the problems, information needs and objectives of community pharmacists? A mixed method approach”.1

Our publication focusses on current problems that community pharmacists face with discharged patients. One of our aims was to evaluate if pharmacists see any benefit from transferring information from the hospital to community. We agree that this is only one possibility – among many others that you stated – to optimise hospital discharge. Some of the strategies named in the letter, like collaborative relationships or the technical development, were also brought up by study participants. But we did not aim to give an overview of different optimisation strategies, like other authors did.2

This publication was a preparatory work. In our following project (not yet published), we aimed to evaluate the benefit of a pragmatic in-hospital service. The service comprised an in-hospital prescription check by the clinical pharmacist and an enhanced information transfer to the community pharmacist.