The article describes how community settings can promote the use of medications and preventive measures in acute and chronic patients. Moreover, it explains the community pharmacists’ role in raising public health awareness.

Community Pharmacy: An Overview

Community pharmacy is the most famous branch of pharmacy and deals with the distribution of medicines to patients at a community level. It can be described from different points of view; from small-scale compounding to independent prescribing, it has various stages of work. Initially, community pharmacies focused on core functionalities like dispensing and compounding prescription drugs without providing direct patient care. Pharmacists were working without the umbrella of a structural healthcare setting.

Evolution of the Pharmacy Curriculum

Since 1900, the pharmacy curriculum has undergone rigorous updates, enabling pharmacists to provide direct patient care and enhancing their roles in various specialized fields such as community, clinical, hospital, public health, pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics, pharmacogenomics, and industrial and pharmaceutical technology. This revolution has made pharmacists’ access to the structural healthcare area easy.

Public Health and Pharmacy

Public health deals with exploring and managing health-related issues in a specific population. It is an exciting and familiar health science field interconnected with every other healthcare discipline, e.g., medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, etc. In pharmacy, public health can be described as exploring appropriate and inappropriate medication use in a specific population. The pharmacy branch that interacts most closely with public health is community pharmacy because a community pharmacist can be pivotal in monitoring medications in public areas, and that has created a big difference between community pharmacy and other fields.

Roles of Community Pharmacies in Public Health

Community pharmacies play a critical role in raising awareness about chronic diseases, managing pandemics and epidemics, conducting patient counseling seminars for those with chronic illnesses (e.g., diabetes, hypertension, pain management, dialysis), organizing frequent clinics for specific populations (e.g., nephropathic, diabetes, and pain clinics), and collecting medication and family medical histories from local families. A pharmacist is also known as a public health advisor because of these roles, which differentiate them from medical doctors and nursing staff who are involved in direct patient care.

Chronic Disease Management

In chronic disease management, pharmacists can provide awareness and counseling on medication use to patients. Regular follow-ups can tailor the de-escalation of symptoms and inappropriateness in medication use. Additionally, pharmacists can organize community awareness campaigns about chronic illnesses, which can be very beneficial. For example, patients with hypertension can benefit from smoking cessation awareness, and diabetic patients can benefit from knowing what foods contain sugar. All of these campaigns are important to help these patients improve their lifestyles. Beyond the use of medications, lifestyle modifications are essential components in improving the health of patients.

Public Health Initiatives

Pharmacists can lead workshops, lectures, therapy sessions, awareness walks, and handouts regarding public health awareness. Examples of these sessions include medication reconciliation for patients with diabetes, diagnostic testing for patients with concomitant hypertension, and lifestyle modifications for patients with compromised kidneys and livers, etc.

Combating Antimicrobial Resistance

AMR in local communities can be significantly de-escalated with the help of public health advisors. This can be accomplished by restricting the use of antibiotics to those on prescription, advising people not to take them for fever and minor illnesses, consulting with on-call prescribers about whether any changes to antimicrobial prescriptions are necessary, and keeping an eye on patients to ensure proper usage of antibiotics. Community chemists can play a significant role in lowering the risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which is a global public health concern.

Pain Management

Regular pain management is necessary for the recovery of elderly and severely pained patients, such as those with gout, arthritis, back pain, neuropathy, surgical pain, accident and trauma cases, etc. Here, pharmacists can help patients manage their pain and, if they weren’t previously prescribed, add possible painkillers to their regimen. On the potential adverse effects of painkillers, chemists can offer advice.

Mother and Child Care

Mother and child care is critical and challenging. A pharmacist can advise mothers on medication use during pregnancy and the management of labor pain. Pharmacists can also advise mothers on various pregnancy consequences. Dose calculations and drug administration become very careful when treating infants and young children so that a proper vocation can promote a healthy lifestyle.

Record-Keeping and Research

The community is like a family, and record-keeping is an essential skill for community pharmacists because it can help track the records of patients. Each file can detail the patient’s medical history, medication history, current medications, doses, and administration, aiding in future diagnoses and correlations. Pharmacists can help various pharmacoepidemiologic researchers with data collection, quantitative research, and project compilations. A community is a potential substrate for public health researchers, where pharmacists can conduct their research as well as aid in other research.

Conclusion

There is no such established framework, but it is modeled after the West’s organizational structure, and its application ensures high-quality work in the future. Pharmacists are key health workers in a community. They are crucial in promoting public health through medication management, education, and research. Their expertise can contribute significantly to improving healthcare outcomes and advancing medical knowledge within a community.