Pharmacists undertake such traditional roles as compounding and dispensing medications as well as more contemporary services related to health care e.g. clinical services, review of medications to ensure safety and efficacy, and provision of drug information. This translates that pharmacists are the experts medicine in addition to being the primary professions optimizing use of medication for benefit of patients. However, the role of pharmacists has become increasingly challenging in view of the ever increasing complexity of medications and the huge potential for medicines to interact with each other that has rendered prescribing even more difficult. This is especially the because of the fact that medications are currently an increasingly central part of the overall medical care, a phenomenon that is bound to expand going forth (Hudson & Boylan, 2013).
In tackling the challenges, the pharmacy profession must reengineer the medication use system so as to reduce preventable medicine therapy-related adverse outcomes. There is also need to identify well-functions models, design strategies for evaluating and implementing additional models. In addition, there is need for more inter-professional collaboration considering that the growing complexity of modern medicine has surpassed the ability of individual pharmacists to prescribe medication. It would help for pharmacists to become less paternalistic in believing that only they are knowledgeable in this area, thus be more open to the idea of working collaboratively with other health professions and with one another (Hudson & Boylan, 2013). Similarly, pharmacists should embrace the fact that medical education is indeed a lifelong process and always make effort to stay up-to-date with all new medication related information. This requires of the professionals to sustain a culture of reading or reviewing medical journals, keeping abreast with all medical news, participate in Continuing Education (CE) to improve their overall knowledge base.
Reference:
Hudson, B., & Boylan, M. (2013). The School of Pharmacy, University of London: Medicines, Science and Society, 1842-2012. Burlington: Elsevier Science.
