Re‐engineering pharmaceutical care: towards a patient‐focused care approach

Abstract

As healthcare reform takes shape, many challenges face hospital pharmacists. An opportunity exists to combine the principles of patient‐focused care and pharmaceutical care to redesign the role of pharmacy. To achieve this objective, pharmacy departments should adopt business concepts such as process re‐engineering. Process re‐engineering is a change management tool which aims to produce dramatic improvement in performance measures by re‐designing the process. The goal of restructuring is to increase the amount of time pharmacists spend providing pharmaceutical care to patients. The pharmaceutical care concept is a method of delivering pharmaceutical care services that match individual patient needs with the services provided. This article describes many hospital pharmacy department transitions to a patient focused care environment by adopting the patient focused care concept and the process re‐engineering to improve the quality of patient care through systems improvement.

Citation

Al‐Shaqha, W.M.S. and Zairi, M. (2000), "Re‐engineering pharmaceutical care: towards a patient‐focused care approach", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 13 No. 5, pp. 208-217. https://doi.org/10.1108/09526860010342707