Latin American doctors working at a pharmacy looking at some documents on a clipboard

It’s Time to Get Out of Our Comfort Zone and Make Clinical Recommendations

Pharmacy Today, June 16, 2017

Recently, a student on rotation at our pharmacy who had just finished a work-up of a patient with type 2 diabetes and hypertension decided that the patient was a candidate for statin therapy. According to the patient’s history and our records, he had never been tried on a statin and did not have a contraindication to statins. As the precepting pharmacist worked with the student to determine the pharmacological interventions needed for this patient, the pharmacist asked her to make a clinical recommendation to start a statin therapy.

To our surprise, the student said she did not feel comfortable doing so because she had seen how physicians had reacted to pharmacist recommendations during past rotations and throughout her practice experience. Her response, unfortunately, is not unlike that of many of us who have been practicing pharmacy for several years and have not had to make these types of clinical assessments and recommendations. But times have changed!

Read the article on PharmacyToday