Title 1. DEFINITION, SCOPE OF COMMUNITY PHARMACY, ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF COMMUNITY PHARMACIST.pdf ✅

PHARMD GURU Page 1 INTRODUCTION:  From ancient days, medicines are being used to treat various ailments. Medicines are prepared using plant, animal and mineral sources.  The Apothecaries, who were the trained individuals, compounded and dispensed the medicines against the prescriptions given by the physicians.  Availability of modem prepackaged medicines has slowly eliminated the compounding activities of the pharmacists.  Thus the pharmacists are confined to dispensing activity both in hospital and community setting.  However over the years, worldwide pharmacists have gained a special recognition due to their patient focused services. DEFINITION: “Community Pharmacy is defined as a place where the medicines are stocked and dispensed to the patients on a valid prescription and where legally permitted without a prescription and also offer various professional services that improves the health of the patient”. Community pharmacists are the health care professionals easily accessible to the public and supply medicines in accordance with a prescription or sell them without a prescription when legally permitted. In addition to ensuring an accurate supply of appropriate medicines and health care products, their professional activities include patient counseling, dissemination of unbiased drug information, providing clinical pharmacy services, and health promotion. World Health Organization (W.H.O) defines Community Pharmacist as legally qualified, trained health care professional who act as a vital link between the patient and the prescriber. The pharmacist ensures the correct supply of medicines and provides medication usage information both to patients and prescribers and helps in minimizing the drug related problems through clinical pharmacy services. DEFINITION, SCOPE OF COMMUNITY PHARMACY, ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF COMMUNITY PHARMACIST
PHARMD GURU Page 2 SCOPE:  An occupation possessing special attributes characterized by power, knowledge, and autonomy is called as a profession.  An individual possessing knowledge and concerned with providing services to the client, patient or to the community is called as professional.  Among health care professions, medical profession from the beginning dominated the other health related occupations, by virtue of subordination, limitation, and exclusion.  Nursing is an example of subordination in medicine since nurses directly work under the doctors.  Dentistry and Pharmacy are examples of limitation, because dentistry is limited to a part of the body, where as pharmacy limits to a therapeutic technique.  Alternate practice of medicine such as Chiropody, and Osteopathy are the examples of exclusion, since they do not have any official recognition.  Doctor's dominance is preserved by their capacity to determine the overall parameters of the division of labor.  But in recent times, other branches such as physiotherapy, which has achieved some autonomy in the health care system, posing challenges to the dominance of doctors. ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF COMMUNITY PHARMACIST: The consultative group of the World Health Organization listed the following responsibilities as the professional responsibilities of the community pharmacists. The International Pharmaceutical Federation also confines the same. 1) Processing of the prescriptions 2) Dispensing 3) Patient counseling 4) Drug information services 5) Health promotion 6) Health screening services 7) Responding to symptoms of minor ailments 8) Consultation to General Practitioners
PHARMD GURU Page 3 1) PROCESSING OF THE PRESCRIPTIONS: Pharmacists are expected to review and check the prescriptions for the legality, appropriateness and potential drug related problems in the prescription. Upon satisfaction with the content of the prescription, the pharmacist will dispense the prescribed medicines. 2) DISPENSING: The meaning of “dispensing” according to Oxford dictionary is to make up and give out the medicines on a prescription. In the early days as the pharmacists were engaged in compounding activity, the prescribed medicines were appropriately compounded and dispensed to the patient. Currently, prepackaged medicines as various pharmaceutical dosage forms are available in the market, thus the compounding and dispensing activity has become obsolete. Thus the pharmacist should label each item prescribed in the prescription with the name of the patient, age, gender, name of the drug, instructions for proper use of the drug, name of the prescriber and the seal of the pharmacy. 3) PATIENT COUNSELING: Majority of the patients may not have proper ideas about the correct usage of their medicines. Due to their busy schedules and over patient load, often prescribers may give very brief information about the medicines. Thus it is an opportunity for the pharmacists to step into the counseling role. Patient counseling is defined as providing the disease related and medication related information in layman language to the patients or patient’s representative for appropriate use of prescribed medication and controlling the disease symptoms by practicing an appropriate diet and lifestyle modifications as per the individual requirements. Many research studies have corroborated the positive influence of counseling in disease management and improved medication adherence behavior and ultimately on improved therapeutic outcomes and health related quality of life.
PHARMD GURU Page 4 4) DRUG INFORMATION SERVICES: Every year many new molecules are approved by the regulatory authorities and permit the pharmaceutical companies to market them for the labeled indications. However efficacy and the safety profile of these new molecules is often ambiguous. In such situations, prescribers depend on pharmaceutical companies for medication related information. Due to the commercial interests, the information given by the companies in product literature is product favored and biased. To overcome this problem, the pharmacist may take the responsibility to provide unbiased information about the drugs. Drug information is defined as the systematic approach of reviewing various sources of published literature, evaluating the published information and providing the suitable answer to the requester. To provide the information, pharmacist may use various resources such as primary sources (peer reviewed journals e.g., LANCET, BMJ, Annals of Pharmacotherapy etc.), secondary resources (Various databases like IDIS, MicroMedex etc.,) and tertiary resources such as text books and compendia. 5) HEALTH PROMOTION: Pharmacists by virtue of their knowledge, skills and the rapport with the public, they will be able to educate the individuals to practice healthy habits and lifestyle practices to prevent diseases. Health promotion activities include smoking cessation programs, family planning, participation in vaccination program and education about deworming and balanced diet. 6) HEALTH SCREENING SERVICE: Health screening service is the patient care service that is offered by the pharmacists in community pharmacies. Health screening service plays an important role in early detection of the chronic diseases, and thereby patient can receive early treatment and prevent the complications of the disease. By offering health screening service, community pharmacists can also involve in monitoring and managing the chronic disorders like hypertension, diabetes mellitus,