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COLUMBIA, Md. — FLAVORx has begun offering the Pediatric Adherence Toolkit for Nurse Practitioners to foster medication adherence among children.
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Using the kit, nurse practitioners can get help determining if taste is impacting children’s adherence to medications. |
The medication flavoring company said Thursday that the free kit contains materials that nurse practitioners can use in their daily practice to engage children and parents in discussions about their past experiences taking medication, determine if taste will be a factor impeding higher adherence, and discuss taste options available and where FLAVORx can be found.
"Our first step is to encourage providers to acknowledge the importance of taste and palatability to children and parents," stated Ursula Chizhik, PharmD, director of pharmacy programs at FLAVORx. "The unpleasant taste of medication is consistently cited as an obstacle to pediatric medication adherence and should therefore be a key consideration in the management of all pediatric acute and chronic conditions."
In addition, the kit aims to help ensure that pharmacists get the message — written or electronic — that the patient prefers a custom-flavored medication.
FLAVORx noted that nurse practitioners, who are among the nation’s most trusted professionals, are able to discuss and identify medication barriers such as taste or swallowing and then educate and help children and their parents overcome them.
"We had to change a child to a generic form of his maintenance medication, and he refused to take the medication because he didn’t like the taste," according to nurse practitioner Mary Beth Koslap-Petraco DNP, PNP-BC, CPNP, FAANP. "We went to the FLAVORx Flavor Wheel to match the flavor he was used to. Once the FLAVORx was added, the child took the generic medication without any difficulty. Problem solved."
