The most difficult challenge pharmacist face in the future ? what to do to overcome this challenge?
Traditionally, pharmacists have been known to do such traditional roles as compounding and dispensing medications. In the recent past, however, pharmacists have taken newer responsibilities related to health care such as clinical services, review of medications to ensure safety and efficacy, as well as provision of drug information. Generally, pharmacists are not only the experts medicine but also the primary professions in optimizing medication use to the advantage of patients. The increasing complexity of medications along with the growing ability for medicines to interact with each other has made work of pharmacists even more challenging especially as relates to their role of prescribing. This challenge is set to expand going into the future considering the increasing crucial part that medications are to the overall medical care.
However, not all is lost as there a number of ways that the pharmacy profession can tackle the challenges. First, there is need for the pharmacy profession to reengineer the medication use system for the sake of reducing adverse outcomes as a result of preventable medicine therapy. Second, the profession must figure out well-functions models, develop effective mechanisms for evaluating and implementing the additional models.
Third, pharmacists should be pragmatic and open to having more inter-professional collaboration in view of the fact that the rapidly increasing complexity of modern medicine is exceeding the ability of individual pharmacists, particularly as relates to prescribing medication. Therefore, pharmacists stand to benefit more if they became less paternalistic in believing that only they are knowledgeable in this area. This realization would make them swallow their pride and be willing to work in collaboration with other health professions.
Finally, pharmacists need to appreciate the nature of medical education as a lifelong process, and consistently make effort to keep abreast with all new medication related information. This would require of them to nurture more the culture of reading and reviewing medical journals, following medical news, and actively engage in Continuing Education (CE) to grow overall knowledge base relating to medication.
