Essay On Individualisation In Health Care

Future directions in healthcare: Individualisation of drug regimens

Individualisation of drug therapy, referred to as modifying drug selection and drug dosing to a specific patient, to reach a required effect has been an objective of physicians and many other health care providers for many years. Knowledge of the “pathogenesis of the disease, the mechanism of action of the drug, and exposure response relationships provides framework for individualisation” (Lesko & Schmidt 2012). There are multiple advances to individualisation: choosing an antibiotic formed on minimum effective concentrations and bacterial sensitivity, population pharmacokinetics, therapeutic drug monitoring and in recent times pharmacogenomics (Lesko & Schmidt 2012). The main purpose of individualisation is to elevate the efficacy of a drug, and produce the desired therapeutic effect with the maximum chance and minimum toxic effects. The end product of drug development is the practice of the drug in clinical therapy, implying that a drug with narrow margins of therapeutic safety requires us to direct its dosage between one that is very low and expected to be ineffective and one that is too high and likely to be toxic. The dosage must be carefully planned and individualised for each patient, to accomplish some required objectives such as serum concentration, or its profile over time. The patient must also be examined, and serum concentrations monitored at suitable intervals. According to Jelliffe et. al (2004) these intervals should be common enough so patients can be evaluated while there are moderately small changes in the overall amount of drug in the body between observations, therefore if toxicity develops, it can be detected in an early stage hence enablin...

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