Community pharmacy is now witnessing a major shift in the western world as the professionals reposition themselves from a mere dispenser to a prescriber. The acceptance of dispensing drugs via prescription and counseling patients is an accepted norm in developed countries. India needs to considerably catch up on this front, stated Charan Singh Dullat, community pharmacist and member, Alberta Council of Pharmacy, Canada.
 
Globally, community pharmacy is established with the focus towards patients unlike India where it is more product centric. For example, a prescription in developed countries for a pharmacist especially in Canada and the US, is more towards patient reported outcome and goes beyond drug dispensing, he added.

The key objective of community pharmacy is processing of prescriptions, caring of patients, monitoring of drug utilisation, responding to disease symptoms, provide medicine related information to patients and participate in health promotion. Among these the first task on hand for a community pharmacist is to review the prescription for the names of the drugs, maintain dispensing records, suggest required nutrition to improve recovery.
 
The key challenges in implementing the community pharmacy practice is to garner the patient’s confidence and establish a professional relationship with them. Unlike in India, the profession of community pharmacist is seen to only dispense a drug at the counter. It is crucial now for a community pharmacist to ascertain from the consumer about the patient’s earlier health history to advise on the prescription, counsel on medication compliance and caution on its over use and under use to prevent misuse and manage the disease condition, stated Dullat who was in Bengaluru at the Aditya Bangalore Institute of Pharmacy Education and Research addressing the Pharm D students.
 
Community Pharmacy in India is limited to dispensing. However, the government of India has made a slew of efforts to recognise the importance and indispensability of a pharmacist at pharmacy counter and in a hospital. A laudable move of the government is the promotion of generic drugs to the masses through the Jan Aushadhi Stores (JAS) initiative where medicines are 50 percent cheaper making it affordable and easily accessible for the poor patients in India, he noted.
 
Yet another is the enforcement of regulations like the Pharm D norms of 2008, pharmacy practice regulations 2015, mandating pharmacy bridge course for practicing pharmacists and the National Pharmacovigilance program to establish and manage a data base of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) for making informed regulatory decisions on marketing authorisation of drugs to ensure safety of medication. However, there is a need to drive home the importance of community pharmacy practice services in India which makes it patient centric, stated Dullat.