Pharmacists Becoming Physicians: For Better or Worse?

Pharmacists' Professional Satisfaction and Challenges: A Netnographic Analysis of Reddit and Facebook Discussions

Pharmacists, essential healthcare providers, face significant challenges in professional satisfaction and well-being. This study investigates the factors influencing pharmacists' professional satisfaction, mainly focusing on workload, organizational support, job autonomy, work-life balance, and resilience against burnout. Data were collected from relevant online forums on Facebook and Reddit using a netnographic methodology. The data were anonymized and thematically coded to identify key themes from 23 conversation threads, primarily involving or concerning Romanian pharmacists. The analysis revealed several critical issues: widespread dissatisfaction with salaries, challenges in professional recognition, and the demanding nature of university education. Additional themes included economic and financial insights, global trends and technological impacts, personal experiences and satisfaction, professional growth and education, regulatory and market environment, and workplace dynamics. Findings indicate these factors significantly impact pharmacists' job satisfaction and overall well-being. The study concludes that addressing these issues through targeted interventions, such as policy reforms, educational updates, and enhanced organizational support, can improve the professional lives of pharmacists, thereby enhancing their contributions to healthcare outcomes.

Clinical Pharmacy in Psychiatry: Towards Promoting Clinical Expertise in Psychopharmacology

Although clinical pharmacy is a discipline that emerged in the 1960s, the question of precisely how pharmacists can play a role in therapeutic optimization remains unanswered. In the field of mental health, psychiatric pharmacists are increasingly involved in medication reconciliation and therapeutic patient education (or psychoeducation) to improve medication management and enhance medication adherence, respectively. However, psychiatric pharmacists must now assume a growing role in team-based models of care and engage in shared expertise in psychopharmacology in order to truly invest in therapeutic optimization of psychotropics. The increased skills in psychopharmacology and expertise in psychotherapeutic drug monitoring can contribute to future strengthening of the partnership between psychiatrists and psychiatric pharmacists. We propose a narrative review of the literature in order to show the relevance of a clinical pharmacist specializing in psychiatry. With this in mind, herein we will address: (i) briefly, the areas considered the basis of the deployment of clinical pharmacy in mental health, with medication reconciliation, therapeutic education of the patient, as well as the growing involvement of clinical pharmacists in the multidisciplinary reflection on pharmacotherapeutic decisions; (ii) in more depth, we present data concerning the use of therapeutic drug monitoring and shared expertise in psychopharmacology between psychiatric pharmacists and psychiatrists. These last two points are currently in full development in France through the deployment of Resource and Expertise Centers in PsychoPharmacology (CREPP in French).

Enhancing the role played by clinical pharmacists in psychiatric settings to better integrate clinical psychopharmacology into the decision-making process

The importance of clinical psychopharmacological knowledge for modern psychiatric care is both well-established and underdeveloped. Although psychiatric pharmacists are identified as experts in psychopharmacotherapy based on pharmacists' overall expertise in pharmacotherapy, in real-life health settings, such is not necessarily the case. As a matter of fact, (1) pharmacists' real expertise in pharmacotherapy is mainly seen as useful to patients (as part of therapeutic education), (2) pharmacists' practice methods are usually circumscribed to the framework of quality processes (e.g. comprehensive medication management) which are not particularly useful to clinicians who have a greater need for pharmacotherapeutic skills, (3) the difficulties in terms of collaboration between pharmacists and physicians are well-known. We describe here the implementation of an alternative system of pharmacotherapy counselling inspired by case by cases in which the remote expertise of pharmacists in psychopharmacology guided prescribers towards the implementation of recommendations from the literature. This shared decision-making process integrates both the clinical elements provided by the psychiatrist and the pharmacotherapeutic information provided by the clinical psychopharmacist, to promote evidence-based medicine (algorithmic data in recommendations) and tailor-made solutions (drug-drug and drug-disease interactions) for patients. In our experience, the success of such an initiative is likely to promote the development of clinical psychopharmacology in psychiatric settings. Importantly, within this framework, the pharmacovigilance unit and psychopharmacologist are useful resources to guide the decision-making process of the pharmacist-psychiatrist duo.

Is Research Experience Detrimental to a Clinical Pharmacist's Career?

A recent article in the Canadian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy discussed pharmacists’ perception of clinical research. The article illustrated that pharmacists lack the time, resources, and skills to conduct research. In the current paper, two ex-pharmacists, who now work as physicians, commented on the prejudice towards pharmacy researchers. Pharmacy researchers face obstacles such as being mislabeled as “non-clinical” and lacking opportunities to be involved in high-impact publications. The current paper discussed ways to improve pharmacy research, including collaboration with well-established researchers, putting less emphasis on the “clinical” pharmacist title, and changing the pharmacy culture.