TY  - JOUR
T1  - Shared Access to Medicines Does Not Establish Shared Responsibility for Their Safe Use at Home: Clarifying Storage, Handling, and Administration Across Patients, Carers, and Families
A1  - Clara Dubois
A1  - Rajesh Gupta
A1  - Ingrid Larsen
JF  - Annals of Pharmacy Education, Safety, and Public Health Advocacy
JO  - Ann Pharm Educ Saf Public Health Advocacy
SN  - 3108-4850
Y1  - 2026
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
DO  - 10.51847/DSmNMuVzZy
SP  - 143
EP  - 153
N2  - Medication use at home depends on work that is distributed across patients, carers, family members, and pharmacy teams, yet everyday access to medicines can obscure who is expected to perform, decide, monitor, and escalate. This conceptual article develops a Home Medication Responsibility Architecture for distinguishing these functions across storage, supply, identification and preparation, administration, monitoring and escalation, and disposal. The architecture treats responsibility as task-specific, potentially overlapping, and dynamically reallocable. Evidence from family caregiving, dementia, medication self-management, transitions of care, home medicines review, and medication-safety research indicates that medication work is interdependent, context-sensitive, and vulnerable to unclear role transfer. The central contribution is an allocation logic that separates physical access, task performance, decision authority, monitoring responsibility, and escalation accountability. It further distinguishes purposeful redundancy from unowned work and nominal handoff from verified transfer. The resulting account does not prescribe a single responsible actor for the household. It identifies the conditions under which responsibility should be explicit, shared, verified, or reallocated as capacity, illness, regimen demands, and caregiver availability change. This provides a basis for more precise pharmacy assessment, communication, and research on medication safety at home.
UR  - https://smerpub.com/article/shared-access-to-medicines-does-not-establish-shared-responsibility-for-their-safe-use-at-home-clar-6za3pamqcgmo6tp
ER  -