Pharmacy services, automation

Automated pharmacy services as they exist in several European countries also facilitate the study of drug use to a considerable extent. 

What is less clear is how, or whether, the roles of pharmacists will grow or advance. Since no significant increase in the number of practicing pharmacists can be foreseen in the immediate future to take on this increasing workload, while hopefully continuing to expand services and the delivery of pharmaceutical care, pharmacy clearly faces a major challenge. More use of better trained, certified, or even licensed technicians is one approach. More automation and computerization is another. A rapid growth in the expected use of electronic prescriptions may also allow further efficiencies—even the prospect of a paperless automated process. 

Services are labor-intensive. While the backroom operations of a pharmacy fikely will be completely automated some day, the final counseling session always will require human interaction. 

There are a number of methods you could use to verify the status of the doctor including looking back through recent prescription forms to find other supplies requested by the same locum practitioner or ringing other local pharmacies to see if they can confirm his identity. Alternatively, the General Medical Council (GMC) has advised that pharmacists can use the out-of-hours automated service (the telephone number is available via the GMC website - www.gmc-uk.org) to check a doctor s registration if the pharmacist has the doctor s GMC registration number. 

These authors wanted to describe the overall disease impact for patients with chronic epilepsy, using a retrospective cross-sectional design in a managed care organization. Multiple data sources were required, as no single data base served as a repository for the various types of data required, and included administrative databases, medical charts, pharmacy databases, outpatient databases, hospitals, laboratories, outside services, memberships and so on. They found that all the identified sociodemographic variables were available in at least one automated database, as were two of the clinical variables, and 26 of the economic variables. None of the humanistic variables were available in any database. 

In an automated, natural manner, but in different settings from the strictly pharmaceutical, clinical pharmacists integrate clinical research and publications, together with other professionals. This involves disseminating the services that clinical pharmacy has to offer. 

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