The Future of Community Pharmacy Practice in South Africa in the Light of the Proposed New Qualification for Pharmacists: Implications and Challenges

Abstract

Objectives:Community or retail pharmacies are regarded as one of the most common sources of health services throughout the world. In South Africa, community pharmacies have been providing some primary health care services to clients who could afford to pay. These services included screening, family planning, and emergency care for minor ailments. With the introduction of the new qualification, community pharmacies are poised to become providers of expanded services. This paper describes the contents, the implications and challenges of the new qualification in light with future directions for community pharmacy practice in South Africa. Its purpose is to inform relevant stakeholders in South Africa and those outside South Africa that may pursue similar offerings.Methods:Published papers were identified through searches in MEDLINE and Google Scholar using a combination of search terms, namely: ‘community, retail pharmacy, pharmacist/non-medical prescribing, South Africa’. Only articles published in English were considered. In addition, documents from the Ministry of Health of South Africa, the South African Pharmacy Council and curricula materials from schools of pharmacy were also reviewed.Key Findings:Laureates of the new qualification will essentially have the right to examine, diagnose, prescribe and monitor the treatment of their clients or patients. In doing so, this expanded function of prescribing for primary healthcare will imply several practice and infrastructural adjustments; and with many challenges laying ahead in need to be addressed.Conclusions:In conclusion, the authorized pharmacist prescriber qualification augurs a new era for community pharmacy practice in South Africa. This has many implications and some challenges that need to be managed. The pharmacy profession, academia, legislators and political decision-makers need to work together to resolve outstanding issues in a constructive manner.

Actual or Potential Extended Services Performed by Malaysian Community Pharmacists, Perceptions and Barriers Towards It’s Performance: A Systematic Review

“…Such transformation era is also consistently observed in other countries such as Australia, Jordan, China, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom respectively [14][15][16][17][18][19]. For example in Australia, CPs are well known for offering services such as asthma, diabetes, methadone, herbal medicines, hypertension and wound care services as an extra service [14].…”

“…They will be given the right to examine their customers, make a specific diagnosis, prescribe a specific medication to their customers and monitor the outcome of the drug therapy plan [18]. However, in a developed country like the United Kingdom, CPs were only given the right to prescribe some exclusive medications as a part of their extended services while collaborating in work with other GPs for the benefit of their patients [19].…”

“…In addition, CPs have strong desire to perform their knowledge and skills in order to improve their current practice [14]. Besides that, CPs in South Africa believe that they should provide more extended services and take more responsibilities with drug therapy management [18]. Whereas CPs in Hong Kong decide to extend their services as a part of establishing a c working relationship with other health care practitioners [20].…”

“…Interestingly, the barriers are not much different from other barriers noted in other countries. For example, it is also noted that lack of time [14,17,19,21,[23][24][25][26], budget [17,19], reimbursement [14,16,17,19,23,25,26], training [14,19,20,29], self-confidence [14,18,19], knowledge [14,16,17,20,21,23,[27][28][29][30], counselling room, [17][18][19]23] and shortage of pharmacists [14,16,17,27] are among the barriers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Nepal, Pakistan, China, South Africa, Netherlands, Singapore, Canada and United Arab Emirates respectively.…”

Starz-DRP as a Triaging Tool for Community Pharmacists: Perspectives and Expectations of Stakeholders

“…Such events clearly exhibit CPs' progress towards performing patient-oriented services in community pharmacy settings. Furthermore, at the moment it is noted that GPs and CPs in other countries can work as a team to develop and monitor medication therapy plan for the benefit of their patients [34][35][36].…”