Until recently, a career in pharmacy was only known for combining and administering medication. Now, several legislations made the term pharmacy include patient care services like medication review and clinical practice.
Pharmacists are health professionals with expertise in drug therapy. With their effective medication management they want to produce positive health-outcomes.
Pharmacy is divided in Pharmaceutics, Medical Chemistry or Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Pharmacy Practice. Each of these disciplines plays a vital role in health preservation.
Pharmaceutics takes part in an important process: they turn new chemical entities (NCE) into safe and effective medications that patients can freely use.
Medical Chemistry also known as Pharmaceutical Chemistry is in charge of the design and development of pharmaceutical drugs. This branch of pharmacy is a mix of chemistry and pharmacy.
Pharmacy Practice develops pharmacist professionals. Some areas of Pharmacy Practice are patient care, drug discovery and evaluation, professional development, management of many disease stages, pharmaceutical care, communication skills, prevention of drug abuse, incompatibility, health psychology, and clinical interventions like refusing or recommending drugs to certain patients.
Insurance policies and federal regulations on pharmacies have changed making drugs accessible for many people. This causes a shortage of pharmacists, which is certainly bad news for the medical industry and patients in general. In the last decade the lack of pharmacists has increased tremendously.
Today more people have access to drugs thanks to the fact that the aging population is daily bombarded with advertisements. For more demand, more drugs are manufactured. The last decade has seen a dramatic increase of prescriptions (from 2 billion to 3.2 billion).