It's necessary to improve the communication and interaction gap between healthcare providers
Clinical pharmacists become a crucial element of the healthcare team as having up-to-date knowledge about drugs. Improving the continuous communication and interaction with doctors can help to deliver better patient care. The knowledge that they possess beyond that of a doctor will really depend on that doctor’s specialty. For instance, a cardiologist may know the various antiarrhythmic agents very well, he or she may be less familiar with antibiotic agents, and specifically if any of them could affect the cardiovascular drugs that the patient is taking. Pharmacists are the specialists that take all of that medical knowledge and bring it together to catch these types of potential errors, among many others.
A clinical pharmacist on his duty
In response to the invitations from different regions (rural or urban areas), doctors and pharmacists see the repeated problems in communicating and interacting between them:
- Time constraints
- Lack of trusted relationship
- Lack of accessible source of information and advice
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-06903-5
Doc 1: “Walking our educational path, we don’t cross each other, and therefore we don’t know what pharmacists can, and they don’t know what we can.”
Doc 3: “There is also no place where a doctor and a pharmacist could meet because everyone is locked at their place. We lack a common space.”
Doc 7: “Doctors are reluctant to use the knowledge of other health professionals.”
Pharm 2: “Contact with doctors, it was mainly to consult dosage, whether it is really what we see on the prescription or the doctor made a mistake.”
Pharm 11: “Doctors still don’t see that pharmacists could be of any help in their work.”
Pharm 14: “At small institutions, this is inevitable, given that the team of physicians and pharmacists is very small, such consultations are required on a daily basis to determine treatment options. At bigger centres, we have good-quality computer programs, and this collaboration is limited because we do everything using them. At small centres, there is not enough money to buy such programs. As a result, a pharmacist and a doctor have to discuss more issues to make it make sense.”
