Does expanding the role of outpatient pharmacists affect patient outcomes, health services use and costs?
Pharmacists in the community dispense and formulate medicines but also provide services to patients and to health professionals. In this review, the effects of these additional pharmacist roles were assessed and for health professionals included outreach, advice on the best course of therapy and review of medicines regimens. For patients, services included group or individual patient education, monitoring of medications and counselling on directions for use, provision of information, follow-up and identification of medication-related problems including non-adherence. Interventions were delivered as single or multiple sessions or contacts, and ranged from single sessions of only a few minutes’ duration to total intervention lengths in excess of two years. Follow-up was often over several months but was not well described overall. We focus here on the effects of expanded pharmacists’ services in relation to consumers and consumers’ use of medicines.
