What is clinical pharmacy?

What is clinical pharmacy?

Clinical pharmacy is defined as the area of practice in which pharmacists provide patient care that optimises medication therapy and promotes health, wellness and disease prevention. The practice of clinical pharmacy embraces the concepts of both pharmaceutical care, first introduced by Hepler and Strand, and medicines management, which encompasses the entire way in which medicines are selected, procured, delivered, prescribed, administered and reviewed to optimise the contribution that medicines make to producing informed and desired outcomes of patient care.

Hepler and Strand’s definition of pharmaceutical care, ‘the responsible provision of drug therapy for the purpose of achieving definite outcomes which improve the patient’s quality of life’, included pharmacist input in the design, implementation and monitoring of a therapeutic plan, in collaboration with the patient and other healthcare professionals, and helped to change the focus of clinical pharmacy activities from processes to therapeutic outcomes. Despite widespread acceptance, use of the term ‘pharmaceutical care’ in the UK does not always follow the rigorous def-inition of Hepler and Strand, but is often used simply to imply a patient-focused approach to clinical pharmacy practice. In some respects, the term ‘clinical pharmacy’ is somewhat outdated as the National Health Service (NHS) recognises that the term ‘clinician’ refers to all healthcare staff involved with the care of patients. Pharmacy, by definition, is a clinical profession and thus clinical pharmacy is a patient-centred service where the pharmacist is a key member of the multidisciplinary clinical team.