The following broad objectives and requirements are common to pharmaceutical services provided by pharmacists:
| (a) | A sound management structure must be established to ensure efficient practice. The structure must reflect the requirements of various patient groups, the organisational needs and the range and level of activity within the pharmaceutical service. Lines of professional and managerial accountability must be established. |
| (b) | Quality assurance must be an integral part of pharmaceutical practice. |
| (c) | Facilities must comply with statutory requirements, be of sufficient size with adequate equipment to provide the range of activities required of the pharmaceutical service. They must be secure and situated so as to be convenient to both patients and staff. |
| (d) | Safe systems of work must be established and maintained to eliminate, as far as possible, errors in any component of the pharmaceutical service. This requirement is particularly important in the interpretation and dispensing of prescriptions and the distribution of medicines. Such systems must take into account the need to protect staff from hazardous processes or materials and the safe disposal of all waste. |
| (e) | Effective systems of drug supply management must be provided to ensure efficiency and economy. |
| (f) | A prescription monitoring service must be established to ensure that both prescribing and administration of medicines are monitored regularly and to ensure compliance with accepted practice and safe systems of work and encourage effective prescribing. |
| (g) | The counselling of patients or their caregivers must be undertaken to promote the correct and safe use of medicines. The responsible pharmacist must ensure that patients are counselled before they receive medicines that they are to self-administer, when they are discharged, transferred or treated as outpatients. |
| (h) | Medicine information must be provided to promote the safe, effective and economic use of medicines by active and passive provision of accurate information and advice to all members of the health care professions and the public. |
| (i) | Pharmacists must be available to contribute actively to health education programmes in schools, community clinics, patient support groups and any area where compliance is particularly important. |
| (j) | An adverse drug reaction reporting system must be established to facilitate the detection of previously unknown or unpublished adverse effects, to permit the evaluation of factors that influence the safety and toxicity of medicines and promote the generation of statistics on the incidence of various adverse reactions to medicines. The responsible pharmacist must co- ordinate any adverse reaction reporting service. |
| (k) | A pharmaceutical service must be readily available and appropriate for both advisory and logistical purposes. The service must reflect the level of use of medicines for patient care groups. |
| (l) | Pharmacists must initiate, conduct, participate in and support research into any pharmaceutical subject in the practice environment. |
| (m) | Pharmacists must be involved in clinical trials including for example, the development of protocols, be responsible for medicine supplies, monitor administration protocols and maintain trial registers. |
