I recently read an article from the Wall Street Journal titled “How to Care for 30 Million More Patients“. In the article, the author attempted to provide a solution to the coming shortage of physicians to care for the estimated 30 million more patients who will be insured under the recently passed health law. His solution was to have pharmacists be classified as providers due to their training, accessibility and cost-effective means of patient care.
To even try to pose this as a solution to the coming “tidal wave” of newly-insured patients needing medical care is an idea rooted in the ridiculous. Pharmacists are not trained to be medical care providers. The curriculum offered by the most cutting edge pharmacy program just barely touches on true patient care. And as a pharmacist, I can assure you that most pharmacists do not want to have that burden thrust on them. We did not go to pharmacy school to usurp the physician’s authority or medical training, but to fill the role as a contributing member of the healthcare team. And to fill this role requires additional training and certification in patient care activities.
No one can dispute the training that physicians go through to be qualified to render medical care for patients. Pharmacists, even upon graduating and completing residencies/fellowships, may be more experienced in certain pharmacy specialties; however, this does not qualify them to render medical care to patients – especially in accessible settings as retail or independent pharmacy practice. In these environments, pharmacists are not capable, trained or qualified to diagnose, obtain lab data or implement care-plan objectives in the limited time it takes to do all the other tasks required of us.
Our training, while extensive in medications, is “theoretical” and definitive in identifying medication properties and usage criteria that, in reality, pales in comparison to its application of those properties to real patient care. As a preceptor to pharmacy students during their experiential year of rotations, my focus is to try to get the students to apply their theoretical knowledge to real cases and to show them that applying “text-book” thinking can actually hurt their credibility as a future pharmacist and hurt patients.
In order to begin thinking of pharmacists as patient care providers, pharmacy schools will need to re-vamp their pharmacy curriculum. Their focus should be on how to mold future pharmacist’s decision-making skills into applying patient-centric, medication-related information to patient care and how this new thought process can benefit the physician, nurse and others on the healthcare team. When this is accomplished and when patient-care certifications are in place, we can apply for “pharmacist-provider” status, but this is a long time in the future.
Until next week, keep healthy.
Dion