The Pharmaceutical Care Network Europe (PCNE) was established in 1994 and it became an official association (under Dutch law) in 2004.
Pharmaceutical Care is the pharmacist's contribution to the care of individuals, in order to optimize medicines use and improve health outcomes.
Medication review is an essential element of pharmaceutical care. PCNE has held several workshops and symposia on the topic. Reports from this work can be found on this site. The aim of the working group is to bring experts together in order to create a set of guidelines for conducting medication review, including an algorithm for patient selection. Most useful information can be found in the reports of the different symposia.
In 2017, experts had extensive discussions during a consensus meeting in Hillerød, Denmark. This resulted in following PCNE definition:
Medication review is a structured evaluation of a patient‘s medicines with the aim of optimising medicines use and improving health outcomes. This entails detecting drug related problems and recommending interventions.
In view of the discussions, a position paper was deemed necessary that would clarify the different elements of the definition and justify the choices. This position paper can be found here. The process was published in 2018, and the paper can be found here.
PCNE also has defined the different types of medication review, and the result can be found in a short statement.
