Pharmacy Daily | Pharmacist opioid role

PHARMACISTS have mixed views on their professional roles when it comes to the dispensing of potentially harmful prescription medications, a new study reveals.

The research published in the International Journal of Pharmacy Practice found pharmacists' perceived scope of practice impacted on their management of patients presenting with prescriptions for opioids.

The authors interviewed 21 Brisbane-based pharmacists to explore how they viewed their responsibilities to patient care in the context of a complex case involving polypharmacy and opioid use with risks of toxicity and/or misadventure.

They found three main perceived scopes of practice emerged, with participants who adopted a legal focus "paid little attention to broader issues related to the patient's medication management", while those who considered supply as their role felt they needed to clarify "how frequently the patient was using the medication and whether this corresponded with the dispensing interval to determine whether it was appropriate to dispense to avoid oversupplying the patient".

The third, and largest, group reported that medication management was their primary focus.

"Participants who took a medication management focus noted the multiple medicines the patient was taking and sought to undertake strategies that would lead to more effective and safer medication use," the authors said.

"All participants who identified their role as one of the medication managements described it in terms of improving patient outcomes."

The group was also split in three when it came to the pharmacist's responsibility (full, shared and limited).

Of those who said pharmacist would have limited responsibility for adverse events, two suggested "if pharmacists are to do more in these scenarios they need to be paid for intervention/information and not merely the supply of the medication".

However, the authors found those who said they would be fully responsible "tended to see their responsibilities in a similar light to the responsibilities of the prescriber and were more likely to acknowledge that prescribers face most of the same barriers to complex cases".