Evidence on interventions that target prescribing appropriateness in older adults attending the emergency department and other acute care settings: a scoping review
Lauren Fernandes, Daniel McCarthy, Claire McCormack, Aoife Leahy, Anne Harnett, Abdirahman Mohamed, Ahmed Gabr, Margaret O’Connor, Rose Galvin · 2026
Read Evidence on interventions that target prescribing appropriateness in older adults attending the emergency department and other acute care settings: a scoping review by Lauren Fernandes, Daniel McCarthy, Claire McCormack, Aoife Leahy, Anne Harnett, Abdirahman Mohamed, Ahmed Gabr, Margaret O’Connor, Rose Galvin (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13569505.txt.
Description
Lauren Fernandes and co-authors map, in a 2026 scoping review, interventions that fix inappropriate prescribing for older adults in emergency departments and acute geriatric units, where many medicines and frailty raise risk. Searches across major databases and grey sources from 1991 to 2025 found twenty-one studies, only four of them randomized trials.
Eighteen interventions fell into pharmacist-led medication reviews, computer decision support, staff education, or combinations of those. Inappropriate prescribing was often the main measure, yet few studies reported whether patients actually fared better. The map exposes a field rich in process checks and poor in outcome proof, guiding where future trials should aim.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lauren Fernandes, Daniel McCarthy, Claire McCormack, Aoife Leahy, Anne Harnett, Abdirahman Mohamed, Ahmed Gabr, Margaret O’Connor, Rose Galvin |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 40997 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |