Health
Pharmacist prescribes shift from pills to patients
By Ye Jun (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-02 09:28
When US-trained Chinese pharmacist Lijian "Leo" Cai returned to China for two weeks this month, he only had one day to spend with his family.
The rest of his time was devoted to salons, talks and seminars in Shanghai, Beijing and Jinan, capital of Shandong province, in which he pushed for an overhaul of the pharmacy system.
Cai is the medication safety officer of The University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) and an adjunct faculty member of the College of Pharmacy, Chicago State University (CSU).
During his recent visit to China, he attended Shanghai's Exchange Conference on Clinical Pharmacy, the International Pharmacist Symposium in Jinan and the China-Japan International Pharmacist Forum in Beijing, which gathered pharmacists from 12 countries.
He has already been involved in a cooperative project between the Shanghai Pharmacist Association and UCMC, which will allow 20 Chinese pharmacists to train in the US for one month, starting in January.
Cai went to the US in 1994 to study pharmaceuticals, earning his PharmD (doctor of pharmacy) seven years later.
"Even in the US, the development of pharmacies was undergoing an era of renewal," the 35-year-old Beijinger recalls. "Pharmacies have shifted from drug-centered to patient-centered service."
The concept of the clinical pharmacy was developed in the US in the 1960s and has gradually been put into practice. The system has cultivated comprehensive patient-centered service in the country over the past decade, Cai says.
"As the elderly population in the US grows, medication is becoming more complicated," he says. He explains that senior citizens might have several chronic illnesses, each of which might require two or three different medicines. In these cases, different medicines could interact with one another. So the pharmacist's job is to prevent such problems.
Excluding biological preparations, hospitals offer between 3,000 and 5,000 Western medications. But the average doctor usually prescribes between 30 and 50 medicines frequently and is most familiar with about 100 varieties related to his specialty, Cai says.
"But advanced modern pharmaceutical research and development has created an ever-growing number of new medicines, prompting the use of such modern techniques as automatic medicine distribution machines," Cai says.
The emergence of such facilities has caused pharmacists' role to shift from that of securing and supplying medicines to that of guaranteeing their proper usage.
"One thing we often say now is that we're the advocates of patients' safe medication consumption," he says.
In addition to teaching, Cai's work includes systematic evaluations of medication safety at UCMC. He also started the medical center's residency pharmacist training program along with its pharmaceutical service director in China. And some large hospitals like Peking Union Medical College Hospital started training pharmacists in the clinical pharmacy concept in the 1980s.
Wu Yongpei, an expert with the Chinese Hospital Association Department of Pharmacy Administration under the Ministry of Public Health, decided to develop clinical pharmacies in China after a national study. The ministry approved 50 hospitals to train clinical pharmacists in 2006. A total of 416 pharmacists have been trained.
