Pharmacy: A Profession

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how pharmacists are professionals with an important social responsibility and that there is more to pharmacy than dispensing drugs and serving old ladies. It illustrates the main branches of employment available in the U.K. after graduating-- community pharmacy, hospital pharmacy, pharmaceutical industry and pharmacy advisor and offers an insight into the advantages of each particular branch and what is expected of the pharmacist. It shows how pharmacists have an enormous social responsibility, including contributions to formularies, input on ward rounds, the choice of product for a generically prescribed drug, refusal to dispense prescriptions on legal or therapeutic grounds and more simply via pharmacy opening hours and stock holding.

From the Paper:

"Hospital pharmacy is long established compared to community practice, the pharmacists working in hospital pharmacies often used to regard themselves as rather different than their colleagues in other institutions. What differs the hospital pharmacy from community is that there is no single career structure for hospital pharmacy. Instead, there is an innumerable possibility. Vitally, specialisation in one area does not restrict pharmacists from posts in other areas.[3] Clinical pharmacy forms a large part of hospital pharmacy work, this is ward-focussed pharmacy service. In essence, this means that the pharmacy itself is the point at which medicines are supplied, whilst drug related is offered close to the patients and often attend consultant ward rounds where they influence prescribing.1 Interestingly in recent years there have been moves to limit both the workload of and the hours worked by junior doctors with that pharmacists now carry out some of their duties."

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