Pharmaceutical care and asthma: Protocol of an umbrella review of systematic reviews

Abstract

Introduction: Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses suggest that pharmacists' interventions in asthma patients have a positive impact on health-related outcomes. Nevertheless, the association is not well established and the role of clinical pharmacists is poorly represented, as well as severe asthma patients. The aim of this overview of systematic reviews is to identify published systematic reviews assessing the impact of pharmacists' interventions on health-related outcomes measured in asthma patients, as well as to describe key components of the interventions, the outcomes assessed and any associations between pharmacists' interventions and health-related outcomes.

Methods: PubMed, Embase, Scopus and the Cochrane Library will be searched from inception to December 2022. Systematic reviews of all study designs, severity of asthma and level of care that measured health-related outcomes will be considered. Methodological quality will be assessed using A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2. Two independent investigators will perform the study selection, quality assessment and data collection, any discrepancy will be solved by a third investigator. Both narrative findings and meta-analysis of primary study data included in the systematic reviews will be synthesised. If data are appropriate for quantitative synthesis, the measures of association will be expressed as the risk ratio and difference in means.

Discussion: The first results on the establishment of a multidisciplinary network for the management of asthmatic patients have shown the benefits of integrating different levels of care in disease control and morbidity reduction. Further studies showed benefits in hospital admissions, patients' basal oral corticosteroid dose, exacerbations and quality of life of asthma patients. A systematic review is the most appropriate design in order to summarise the literature and identify the evidence of the benefits of interventions performed by clinical pharmacists in asthma patients, especially those with severe uncontrolled asthma, and encourage future studies to stablish the role of clinical pharmacists in asthma units.

Registration details: Systematic review registration number: CRD42022372100.

Keywords: Asthma; Clinical pharmacist; Health care; Outcome assessment; Pharmaceutical care; Systematic review; asma; atención farmacéutica; evaluación de resultados en salud; farmacéutico clínico; revisión sistemática.