The Pharmacist and Quality of Patient Care

Pharmaceutical care essentially is the acceptance of a social responsibility for the healthcare needs of an individual patient by a pharmacist. It is patient-centric and outcomes oriented. Its primary objectives are to promote health, to prevent disease and to assess, monitor, initiate and modify medication use to ensure that drug therapy regimens are safe and effective for the patient. It is the responsible provision of drug therapy for the purpose of achieving definite health related outcomes that improve a patient’s quality of life. As medical advances have led to cures and improved treatments of disease and delayed mortality, it is logical for a pharmacist to be involved in not only saving lives but also in terms of improving the quality of patients’ lives. Quality of life then becomes an important tool in addition to the traditional outcomes of health such as mortality and morbidly. It reflects an increased appreciation for not only how long a person lives, but also on how well he lives. Understanding how a patient’s disease affects his/her Quality of Life is an important part of the patienthealthcare provider relationship of which the pharmacist is an integral part. The goal of healthcare should be to confer and to ensure a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, a state of ease and not merely the absence of disease. Until a few years ago, the medical model of healthcare involved the approach of taking the medical history and examination of the patient, followed by investigations and treatment. The success of this model was determined by the clinical measures of outcomes at the end of treatment. This model was deficient in determining the patient’s perspective of the outcome, in that it failed to discern whether the health needs of the patient had been met, and if the healthcare process was satisfactory and if the disease burden on the patient’s Quality of Life had been reduced. The challenges in determining and quantifying quality of life and more specifically health related quality of life is that it involves several parameters and variables which differ in a myriad ways. The impact of a disease Githa Kishore