A study carried out by Maresca Pizzuto, a fifth year pharmacy student, has shown that involving a pharmacist in a hospice to educate patients, monitor therapeutic outcomes, recommend drug therapies, and develop protocols resulted in a better quality of life for the cancer patients.

The project was carried out with the objective of developing and evaluating pharmacist intervention in palliative care and to develop documentation tools for a hospice pharmacist. The project found that even after a hospice pharmacist's first visit, patients' compliance with medications improved, indicating that such interventions were useful. The study concluded that government should consider providing the Hospice Movement the services of a pharmacist in order to improve cancer patients' quality of life.

The study consisted in visiting sixteen randomly selected patients twice at home. Documentation tools were developed and used to record pharmacist interventions during the visits. The McGill Quality of Life Questionnaire (MQOL) and the Compliance Questionnaire were distributed to patients. The second visit took place four weeks later. The data obtained from both questionnaires was processed using SPSS version 14.0.

The main outcome measure involved the impact of pharmacist on patients' compliance, pharmacist interventions, QOL, and patients' perception towards the hospice pharmacist.

It was found out that the mean total number of medications taken in the first visit was 7.77, of which 7.38 were cancer-related. In this visit 38.5 per cent of patients said they always complied with medications prescribed. This figure doubled in the second visit.

According to the McGill questionnaire, an improved QOL was achieved after the pharmacist intervention in the first visit. Pharmacist interventions for all patients included preparing a patient drug diary, education and assessment of compliance. During the first visit 15.38 per cent of patients said that a pharmacist is needed, compared to 76.92 per cent in the second visit.