Pharmacists' Roles in Collaborative Practice

Strong working relationships between pharmacists and physicians are needed to optimize patient care. Understanding attitudes and barriers to collaboration between pharmacists and physicians may help with delivery of primary health care services. The primary role of the pharmacist is evolving from a focus on dispensing medications to taking increased responsibility for and facilitating optimal medication use through collaboration.

The increasing complexity of medication therapies underscores the need for strong working relationships between pharmacists and physicians to optimize patient care. The organized structure of institutional settings facilitates communication and collaboration between health care professionals. Hospital pharmacists have demonstrated their ability to improve care by decreasing mortality and morbidity, reducing adverse drug events and reducing health care costs.

Pharmacy practice in now involves patient-centred care including counselling, providing drug information, monitoring drug therapy and patient adherence, as well as the supply of medicines. Over the last decade, the role of pharmacists in the community has expanded with the provision of many professional services including medication reviews, diabetes and asthma management programs, and patient medication profiles.

It is in the additional role of managing medication therapy, in collaboration with prescribers, that pharmacists can now make a vital contribution to patient care. To do so, the role of the pharmacist needs to be redefined and reorientated. The traditional relationship between the doctor as prescriber, and pharmacist as dispenser, is no longer appropriate to ensure safety, effectiveness and adherence to therapy.

Pharmacists need to pay more attention to patient-centred, outcomes-focused care to optimise the safe and effective use of medicines. Dispensing is, and must remain, a responsibility of the pharmacy profession, but prescribing and dispensing should not be done by the same person. By taking direct responsibility for individual patients' medication-related needs, pharmacists can make a unique contribution to the outcome of medication therapy and to their patients' quality of life.