What is hospital pharmacy?
Hospital pharmacy is the health care service, which comprises the art, practice, and profession of choosing, preparing, storing, compounding, and dispensing medicines and medical devices, advising healthcare professionals and patients on their safe, effective and efficient use.
Hospital pharmacy is a specialised field of pharmacy which forms an integrated part of patient health care in a health facility.
Hospital pharmacy is the profession that strives to continuously maintain and improve the medication management and pharmaceutical care of patients to the highest standards in a hospital setting.
The missions of the hospital pharmacist
- to be part of the medication management in hospitals, which encompasses the entire way in which medicines are selected, procured, delivered, prescribed, administered and reviewed to optimise the contribution that medicines make to producing informed and desired outcomes
- to enhance the safety and quality of all medicine related processes affecting patients of the hospital
- to ensure the 7 “rights” are respected: right patient, right dose, right route, right time, right drug with the right information and documentation
View a literature review on the impact of hospital pharmacy here.