PHA 599: Critical Care APPE ADE Paper Guidelines

Purpose of Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to develop your adverse drug event assessment skills along with your professional writing skills. Your paper should be based on an adverse drug event that occurred in one of your patients during this rotation. It should be based on a more serious and uncommon reaction (i.e. avoid writing about constipation from opiates, etc.). In general the paper should be a few (length will vary depending on the ADE) double-spaced pages long (front side only with Arial or Times New Roman 12-point font). It should be appropriately referenced and should be written at a level and style appropriate for publication.

General Structure of Paper

• Introduction: Brief discussion of the disease state that was being treated, other potential causes for or information about the reaction, or other information important to the particular patient case or topic.
• Patient case: In-depth review of the events leading up to and surrounding the occurrence of the ADE. Include all pertinent subjective and objective information that occurred before, during and after the ADE.
• Discussion: Discussion of the patient case and ADE presented, including possible causes, mechanisms and treatments for the ADE. Appropriate information from available literature should be incorporated and discussed in this section, including, but not limited to, previous case reports, case series and review articles. The score and rank of the ADE on the “Naranjo Nomogram for Adverse Drug Reaction Assessment” (found in the APPE manual) should also be included and discussed in this section. A copy of the completed Naranjo Nomogram should be appended to the final draft of your paper.
• Conclusion: Brief summary of what has been presented including any clinical pearls.
• References: List all references cited throughout the paper in this section according to the National Library of Medicine guidelines.

Helpful Tips

• Use headings to separate each section of the paper
• Consider incorporating information into tables, charts or graphs if necessary
• Literature is generally not cited in the patient case section since all this information should be coming directly from the patient’s hospital course
• See the following reference included in your rotation materials:

Cohen H. How to write a patient case report. Am J Health-Syst Pharm. 2006; 63:1888-92.

• For more specific examples see the “Case Reports” section of any issue of the journals The Annals of Pharmacotherapy or Pharmacotherapy regarding your paper’s style and structure (your reports are not expected to be quite to this level, but the general format still applies).