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.
With the increasing international use of the PCNE-DRP Classification, and many translations, a more thorough validation is necessary; just face validity is not enough. There are eight criteria that should be considered in the selection of drug related problem classifications, those criteria in the mean time also constitute criteria for validation.
Appropriateness: is the classification content appropriate to the questions which the classification seeks to address, namely coding drug-related problems, its causes and interventions?
Acceptability: is the DRP-classification instrument acceptable to health care professionals and researchers, for the aims that it has been developped for?
Feasibility: is the instrument easy to administer and are the results easy to process?
Interpretability: how interpretable are the scores of the instrument?
Precision: how precise are the scores of the instrument?
Reliability: does the instrument produce results that are reproducible and internally consistent?
Validity: does the instrument document what it claims to measure?
Responsiveness: does the instrument offer options to follow interventions and outcomes of interventions? This aspect is obviously closely linked to precision.
With the construction of the classification V9.0, a new international validation project was also started, based on a validation set of cases (Set 2019). In this validation round, the interpretability, precision and reliability aspects of validity are being assessed, as well as the acceptability.
At the preliminary evaluation of this validation round with the results of approx. 50 respondents, a number of issues became obvious. These issues were discussed with pharmaceutical care experts during the Working Symposium 2020 in Egmond aan Zee, and were found to be cause by the classification itself as well as the cases used. During the months March and April 2020, the working group adapted the classification based on the results of the discussions in Egmond, leading to a version 9.1. Also the cases were adapted, leading to a version Set 2020.
The report of the first validation round can be found here and is publicly available. The data are also available, but only for PCNE members (password protected) and the national coordinating centres.
The adapted classification and cases went into international validation round 2. 158 pharmacists from 12 countries completed the survey. The report of the second validation round can be found here and is publicly available. The executive summary is also available. These issues were discussed with pharmaceutical care experts during the online Working Conference 2021.
