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Pharmacist Prescribing: Is Collaborative Practice a Path of the Future?
As policymakers and other stakeholders continue debating how to best balance affordable health care and patient access, they are increasingly looking to expand the role pharmacists play in patient care. Numerous factors, including rising health care costs, a longer-living population, and increased reliance on pharmacotherapy, as well as advances in pharmaceutical and biomedical research, increased minimum educational standards for pharmacists entering the workforce, and the shortage of primary care practitioners are encouraging a re-examination of the role pharmacists play in the provision of health care. Increasingly, and not exclusively confined to institutional settings, pharmacists may work in a clinical role as an active part of a team, providing patient-centered drug therapy management as well as disease-prevention and health-improvement services. As part of their role in medication therapy management, pharmacists increasingly are gaining the authority, through collaborative practice agreements, to prescribe medications, as well.
The full article is available in the June-July NABP Newsletter (PDF).
