BMJ  2007;334 (26 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.39225.424479.3A

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Explaining negative results

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This week's BMJ contains research that goes contrary to expectation, which raises all sorts of questions. Richard Holland and colleagues studied the effectiveness of sending pharmacists to visit heart failure patients in their homes (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39164.568183.AE). These pharmacists, called community pharmacists in the UK, had been specially trained to deal with patients about therapeutics and were knowledgeable about drug side effects and adherence problems. They made two visits to each of 293 heart failure patients shortly after hospital discharge and spent an average of almost six hours with each patient.

Despite expectations that this intervention would reduce subsequent hospitalizations and improve patients' quality of life, it didn't. The reasons for this failure are not obvious. The authors state that it might be because the intervention wasn't delivered as intended, or was given to patients too late in the course of their disease to make a difference, or because the . . . [Full text of this article]

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