Community Pharmacist: A Tool in Health Care System

A lot has changed and continue to change, and the pharmacists are also changing focus from medicine to medicine user across the globe. During this role shift, the competency of community pharmacists is in higher demand than ever before. In view of availability of numerous new medicines and drug delivery systems, community pharmacists are challenged to ensure that patients get maximum benefit from their medicines. In such a changed scenario i.e. availability of numerous FDC, DDS, SR products, and targeted DDS, physician alone will fail in guaranteeing the proper use of medicines that leads to the expected result. The community pharmacist would be the right man to guide the patient and their relative about dosage regimen, adverse reaction, storage condition, and time interval between to successive dosage likelihood of drug interaction precaution to be taken etc. It is essential that discovery of new drug, new therapeutics effect of relatively older drugs, clinical trials, toxicological studies etc are all carried out involving community pharmacy at different phases. The pressures driving the need for an expanded practice scope in community pharmacy have been building for the past 2 decades. This review explain broader concept of public heath and outline the potential contribution that community pharmacist can make to this agenda. It also describes what steps community pharmacist can take to increase their involvement and contribution to public health at a local level in collaboration with other public health.