Time for pharmacists to accept their role in community pharmacy: Pakistani perspective.

Abstract

The pharmacy profession has not yet been recognized as an integral part of health care systems in many developing nations, even after introducing more clinically oriented PharmD pharmacy education programs. This is firstly due to lack of acceptability for pharmacists in the health care team and secondly due to collective professional irresponsibility. In a study recently conducted in Pakistan, pharmacists from different settings were asked a simple yes/no questions, and many of them reported being reluctant to utilize their potentials in community pharmacy. This is coupled with an immoral contravention of selling substandard, spurious, counterfeit and unregistered drugs. As such, momentous action must be taken to motivate pharmacists for raising the level of practice in community pharmacy, and to abolish hurdles in delivery of effective and valuable care services to the patients. As previously mentioned, pharmacy education in Pakistan has gone through evolutionary stages. Initially it was a three-year bachelor’s program, which was changed to four-year program in 1978. A major change occurred in 2003, when a clinically oriented PharmD program was adopted. The purpose was to keep up with evolving international standards of pharmacy practice and increase career potentials for pharmacists. Unfortunately, these goals remain elusive. Pharmacists have come across many interwoven and multifaceted challenges in performing patient care. Among these challenges, the lack of recognition in health care team is of prime