Need of advance clinical pharmacy services: A case study from Pakistan

Abstract

Clinical pharmacists play a key role in health-care by providing drug information to other health-care professionals, pharmaceutical care to individual patients and developing clinical guidelines and standard treatment protocols for treating various medical conditions in day-to-day practice. A clinical pharmacist offers valuable support in the development of a final prescription with improved patient management and better safety. Increasingly, clinical practice is becoming a team effort with a specialized skill matrix, concentrating on comprehensive support for patient management. A physician definitely leads the team, comprised of a professional and skillful clinical pharmacist, among others, with skill sets to detect drug interactions, adverse effects, and therapeutic incompatibilities to facilitate the health-care team to achieve therapeutic outcomes on a case-by-case basis. We described ten cases of patients diagnosed with tuberculosis, drug related problems identified during the study period and strategies suggestion for improvement of the pharmacy profession.

Keywords

• Clinical pharmacy
• drug related problems
• Pakistan