Clinical Pharmacist Competencies

The American College of Clinical Pharmacy (ACCP) strategic plan summarizes its core ideology, envisioned future, core purpose and mission, and critical issues for the organization and the profession. A longstanding critical issue of the college’s plan is how ACCP can contribute to ensuring an appropriately educated and skilled clinical pharmacy workforce. Toward that end, the college sought to publish a definition of clinical pharmacy and establish the competencies of a clinical pharmacist. Coincident with the development of its definition of clinical pharmacy, the ACCP Board of Regents charged a task force to develop a complete set of competency statements for the clinical pharmacist. These statements were to be assessable and able to serve as a foundation for the development of future clinical pharmacist assessment tools. In developing the competency statements for this paper, the authors reviewed a number of documents that addressed competencies within the profession of pharmacy, including the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) Accreditation Standards for the Doctor of Pharmacy degree, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Center for the Advancement of Pharmaceutical Education (CAPE) Education Outcomes, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) and ACCP joint statement on learning objectives for residency training in pharmacotherapy, and the Board of Pharmaceutical Specialties content outline for the Pharmacotherapy Specialty Certification examination. Consensus competencies of a clinical pharmacist were identified. Draft competencies and associated content knowledge components were then prepared for review by the ACCP Board of Regents. After extensive deliberations, the authors identified key differences between the competencies of a clinical pharmacist and today’s pharmacy generalist.