Abstract
Traditionally, pharmacy has long been regarded as a transitional discipline between health and chemistry [1]. However, since the 1950s the large-scale manufacturing of medicinal products by the pharmaceutical industry has limited the role of pharmacists to mainly compounding, dispensing and labeling drugs prescribed by physicians. Nowadays, pharmacists practice in a variety of settings—community and hospital pharmacies, regulatory and health authorities, pharmaceutical industry and research—and are generally recognized as drug experts regardless of their specific role. Although scientific knowledge is still the core of pharmacy education, pharmacists now seem to perceive it as somehow less relevant, and consider clinical patient-centered activities to be increasingly important [2], recently also including prescribing, claiming that the pharmacist’s involvement is vital to reducing clinical errors [3]. Here we focus on hospital pharmacists (HPhs), a historically recent profession, which still includes only a minority of pharmacy graduates (in Europe [4] and elsewhere), to analyze the ‘state of the art’ of this specific role, whose professional tasks are still debated in many European countries.
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