Literature Review: Scholarly Source #1 The article by Alldred, Kennedy, Hughes, Chen, and Miller (2016) provides a review of scholarly literature describing the results of interventions aimed at improving medication prescribing practices in nursing homes. The authors state that there exists a considerable amount of evidence that prescribing practices in nursing homes remain suboptimal, and that these practices need to be improved in order to enhance patient outcomes and reduce costs required for care. The authors included 12 studies in their review; these studies pertained to 10,953 residents in 355 nursing or care homes which were located in 10 different countries. Out of these 12 studies, the research design of 9 studies was cluster-randomized controlled trials, whereas the other 3 studies featured the patient-randomized controlled trial design. The review conducted by Alldred et al. (2016) revealed that providing nursing homes with interventions aimed at improving medication prescribing practices may lead to the following outcomes:   * a reduction in the number of days that patients spend in hospitals;   * a slower reduction of the quality of life of the patients caused by their health;   * better identification of problems related to medication, and their further resolution;   * enhanced appropriateness of medication. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether the interventions for enhancing medication prescribing practices were able to cause an improvement in the following factors:  1. lowering the cost of drugs;  2. adverse medication events;  3. mortality. On the whole, however, the study confirms that providing interventions for nursing homes with the purpose of bettering their medication prescription practices may allow for significantly enhancing certain patient outcomes and improving their overall quality of life, as well as for lowering the amount of time that such patients spend in hospitals. These findings confirm that the current quality improvement project may help enhance the quality of life of patients of nursing homes. Literature Review: Scholarly Source #2 The article by Brulhart and Wermeille (2011) describes the results of a study aimed at researching the outcomes of implementation of a pharmaceutical care intervention in a number of nursing homes for elderly individuals. The researchers implemented the interventions in 10 nursing homes in Switzerland during the period starting in January 2007 and ending in December 2009, and reviewed the drug therapy of 329 patients. Prior to the interventions, each patient took the number of medicines ranging from 2 to 27, with the mean value of 12.8. The researchers were able to detect a total of 1,225 drug-related problems in the sample; these were discussed with the nurse and the physician serving these patients. The interventions resulted in re-evaluation of treatment for the patients, and led to the total of 803 treatment adaptations (Brulhart & Wermeille, 2011):   * 373 cases: medications were cancelled;   * 197 cases: dosages were adjusted;   * 95 cases: the instructions for the drug use were revised;   * 86 cases: medication choices were changed;   * 35 cases: drug formulations were adjusted;   * 17 cases: new medications were started. On the whole, the interventions permitted for considerably reducing the annual spending pertaining to medications in nursing homes. Also, the nurses and practitioner