Antipsychotic drugs use increased in Canadian long-term care homes, pointing to possible quality-of-care issues: study
CTV
New study finds increase in antipsychotic drugs use in long-term care homes across Canada, despite no significant increase in behavioural symptoms – something that may expose a potential area of concern for quality of care, researchers say.
A new study has revealed an increase in antipsychotic drugs use in long-term care homes across Canada despite no significant increase in behavioural symptoms of residents – something that may expose a potential area of concern for quality of care, researchers say.
The study, published in Health Services Insights, examined data from yearly Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reports to assess how COVID-19 impacted resident admission and discharge rates, resident health attributes, treatments, and quality of care.
The report data was collected two years pre-pandemic and in the first year of COVID-19, and was from more than 500,000 residents across Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia.
The researchers focused on these provinces as they were home to facilities with the highest number of COVID-19 cases early on in the pandemic.
There was an approximately 10 per cent in risk adjusted odds of potentially inappropriate antipsychotic drug use across the provinces studied, compared with the pre-pandemic period, according to John Hirdes, professor at the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo.
The increase was found to be greatest in Alberta, and the lowest in Ontario, according to the study results. Antipsychotic drug usage in Alberta went from 18.4 per cent in 2019/2020 to 20 per cent in 2020/2021. In Ontario, usage went from 20.4 per cent in 2019/2020 to 22.3 per cent in 2020/2021.
This increase may expose a potential area of concern for quality of care, as the researchers did not observe a significant increase in behavioral symptoms of psychosis that would lead patients to require antipsychotic drugs.
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