BHA 310 SLP ROLE OF HEALTH PROFESSIONAL Health, Medicine Essay

The Role of Pharmacists
Student’s Name
Institution
The Role of Pharmacists
Duties and Responsibilities of Pharmacists
The pharmacist is responsible for feeling the prescription of a patient by correctly dispensing medication. This involves proper dosage and labeling of the drugs. Also, they are responsible for enhancing patient safety by reducing medical errors. This can be done through proper medical reconciliation, especially at the time of transition of care. It can also be done through proper documentation of patients’ medication history. It has been revealed that over 25% of medication errors stem from inaccurate medication history (Mohiuddin, 2020). Besides, pharmacists have a duty of educating patients about the drugs they are taking. This not only occurs when giving patients instructions on how to take the drugs but also in answering any questions that patients may have concerning the drugs. They also have a duty to communicate any medical-related issues with the physician so that they can determine how to best serve the patient. As indicated by Grass (2016), pharmacists have a duty to not only identify but also address any areas of concern or “red flags” before they can dispense any medication to ensure that the drugs serve the intended purpose.
Case Analysis: Did the Pharmacist Perform Required Duties?
In the case of “The Medicine Shoppe”, a family-owned pharmacy, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) revoked the pharmacy’s certificate of registration because the pharmacists had not performed their “corresponding responsibility (Grass, 2016).” This failure hindered the pharmacists from determining whether the medication for their specific patient was serving the intended purpose. However, the pharmacists indicated that they often confirmed the prescription with the doctor before filling it by obtaining the identity of the patient as well as the dosage. In this sense, the pharmacists performed their duties and upheld the patient’s rights to pain medication. However, pharmacists have a duty beyond such confirmation to ensure a patient’s safety. As revealed by Chairello (2015), pharmacists have to do more than fill a prescription; they also need to keep watch on the patients to determine their truthfulness in using prescription drugs, especially when they have a valid prescription from a physician. Since the pharmacists only confirmed the prescription with the physician, they did not look further to identify whether the patient was truthful in their use of the drugs. The pharmacists' code of ethics states that pharmacists have to “…to act with conviction of conscience (American Pharmacists Association (APhA), n.d.).” This means that pharmacists have to apply practical reason, especially in unclear situations. For instance, when giving medication to a patient in pain and has a valid prescription, pharmacists will need to watch the patient identify whether they are using the drugs as intended because it would be wrong to deny such patients their pain medication. Yet, they could be abusing the drugs.
Was the Pharmacist at Fault?
The pharmacist was not at fault because while they did not go beyond the...