What is Pharmacy?
Pharmacy (from the Greek 'pharmakon', meaning drug) is the health profession concerned with the design, evaluation, production and use of medicines, and is concerned with ensuring the safe and effective use of medication.
The major goal of pharmaceutical care is to achieve positive outcomes that improves the patient's quality of life from the use of medication. These positive outcomes include:
- elimination or reduction of symptoms
- cure of a disease
- arresting or slowing a disease process
- diagnosis of disease
- prevention of disease
- desired alterations in physiological processes
The scope of the pharmacy practice includes traditional roles such as the compounding and dispensing of medications, but also includes modern services related to patient care, including reviewing medications for safety and efficacy, clinical services, and providing drug information.
Pharmacists must be knowledgeable about the composition of drugs, their manufacture and uses, their physical and chemical properties, and as well as how products are tested for strength and purity. A pharmacist needs to understand how a drug will work within the body, how it interacts with other drug substances, its side-effects, and how it should be formulated to have optimal therapeutic efficacy.
Pharmacists must also be able to provide advice and information on health, providing medications and associated services, and referring patients to other sources of help (e.g. to doctors) when necessary.
