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Ideas for Observing "Talk About Prescriptions" Month |
- Host a medication check-up event at your health care facility, pharmacy, community or senior center, or continuing care/ retirement community. Use NCPIE's National Medication Check-Up Kit to help you plan, advertise, and conduct your event.
- Host a "Health on the Web" event at your local library, school, health care facility, community college or as an adult education course. Focus on reputable sites for health and medicine information, safe on-line pharmaceutical purchasing (how to distinguish and avoid "rogue" sites), and best sites for medicine-specific information. Sites that allow consumers to search for possible drug interactions on-line could also be discussed. To get started, refer to the "Healthy Websites" article in our TAP Planning Kit.
- Contact your local television (or radio) station's public affairs director, and offer to provide speakers for their community issues roundtable show in October. The program's topic could be: "Educate Before You Medicate: Knowledge is the Best Medicine." Speakers could be practicing health care professionals, consumers, health reporters, communication experts, hospital risk managers, and/or industry and managed care patient education representatives. The program could focus on tips for safe medication use. For call-in radio programs, order NCPIE's Medication Wallet Cards as a practical give-away to listeners.
- Contact your state or local nursing, medical or pharmacy society and offer to present a short program on safe medication use, prescribing guidelines for antibiotics, research on dietary supplement/prescription medicine interactions, and/or maximizing medicine communication "teachable moments" with patients. (Articles on several of these issues are elsewhere in this site.) For example, if you're a member of your local medical society, perhaps you could plan a multi-disciplinary presentation to your local pharmacy or nursing society. To avoid "preaching to the choir," work with your colleagues to secure an audience of health care professionals whose meeting you otherwise would not attend.
- Contribute an "Educate Before You Medicate" article or column to your community newspaper, employee newsletter, employer website, or religious bulletin
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