Pharmacy services are an important part of the health care system. Advances in technology are changing the world, and the pharmacy profession stands to benefit greatly from the proliferation of technological innovation. Education is also the foundation for improved health care and quality. Pharmacists are the people who are most vulnerable to the challenges of development because of lack of continuing education and exchange of knowledge. In most of the developing countries where the under graduate curricula do not always expose students to the practice environment, resulting in a feeling amongst the students that they are not adequately trained. They do not have the current information about the practices across the globe and the advancements in the profession of pharmacy has achieved.
Exchange programme gives opportunities to young pharmacists to share their views and ideas nationally or internationally, providing real opportunities to learn how the other countries are practicing pharmacy and what are the options available for pharmacy graduates to practice or to initiate pharmaceutical care services. This ultimately helps the country for standard pharmacy practice. Challenges facing hospital and community pharmacists include a lack of acceptance by other members of the healthcare team due to unexercised services on the role of the pharmacist.
Challenges
At present there are too many community pharmacies in India. This has led to competition and to some extent, has compromised the quality of professional services. One of the important reason behind this is the profession of pharmacy doesn't attracts the cream of the profession to the area of pharmacy practice. This exchange and continuing educational programmes, enhance the quality and standard of their practices. For example, community based pharmacy practice is not well developed in most of the developing countries due to lack of skilled expertise. The lack of exposure of pharmacy students in these areas is either due to the absence of such practices or a compulsory internship training after graduation. The students are taught theoretically and no practical exposure in these areas. In actual practice, pharmacists are involved in various areas of pharmaceutical care services like patient counselling, drug information service, prescription monitoring, health-related advising activities, educational programmes for the community and healthcare providers and other pharmaceutical services like drug manufacturing, quality assurance programmes, clinical trials, research and development.
Many studies show that patients experienced low satisfaction with current pharmaceutical care services. Confirming patient medication histories was shown to be important in ensuring appropriate prescribing and safe medication use. Systems for identification and prevention of medication errors in pharmacy services are not known by many of the pharmacists and in fact such practices are not being done. Pharmacists are part of the health care team and provide advice to patients, case management and benefits management.
If we compare pharmacists of developing countries with the developed countries we will realize that the pharmacy practice here is a long way to go. Many of the pharmacists in India are not aware of the crown of seven star pharmacist and its quality. While in the developed countries the young pharmacists are involved in various patient related care services.
- Refresher training for previously trained staff
Refresher training reinforces quality service and information provision to staff according to the needs identified during their service. Refresher training addresses information needs and encourages active participation, sharing of experiences and joint problem solving.
- On-site (on-the-job) trai-ning visits to participating pharmacies
On-site training should be conducted during their works and it represents a significant savings in time and resources needed to organize group training. It also can be more focused and tailored to the specific needs of the participants ensuring that each participant receives the information that they need.
Updating of knowledge is possible only with the exchange programmes and continuing educational programmes for the young working pharmacists where they are exposed to such specialized areas of practice either in pharma or health care industry. Programmes should be designed accordingly to their functional areas and specialization. Such programme will be a real gift for pharmacists across the globe to boost up their knowledge and skill to develop the specialized practices in their living country. This will be useful in improving knowledge and skill to take on new roles in the profession of pharmacy. We are still to improve the specialized clinical pharmacy services of patient counseling, health-related advising activities, drug and poison information and specialized pharmacy services like Oncology pharmacist, Pediatrics pharmacist, ICU pharmacist, I.V. & TPN admixture pharmacist, Hematology pharmacist, Psychiatric pharmacist, Cardiology pharmacist, Geriatric pharmacist and Nephrology pharmacist which contribute to the quality of pharmaceutical care of the community. From the perspective of the pharmacy profession, we think that we will do justice by providing such pharmaceutical care services.
- (The author is with Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, New Delhi.)