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Pharmaceutical care has caused considerable attention in the pharmacy literature, because this concept alters the care and services that pharmacists provide to the public. In the pharmaceutical care concept, pharmacists must ultimately accept their responsibility not only to dispense drugs but also to identify, correct and prevent drug‐related problems. Pharmaceutical care represents a significant transition in the profession of pharmacy, where the primary focus is the patient and outcomes of care rather than the distribution of drug products. This article evaluates the concept of pharmaceutical care as a standard of quality care for many hospital pharmacy practices. As pharmacy directors accept this concept and pharmacists begin to provide pharmaceutical care, it is important to elaborate the concept further.

Institutional pharmaceutical services have widely evolved over the past 20‐30 years. Hospital pharmacy practice has changed from a profession concerned chiefly with the bulk preparation and distribution of drug products to one centred on ensuring optimal drug therapy. Whereas hospital pharmacists were charged with maintaining large drug stock on nursing units, many of them now provide individualised patient therapies. The practice of hospital pharmacy has therefore become one encompassing all aspects of drug therapy, from the procurement of drugs and drug delivery devices, their preparation and distribution, to their most appropriate selection and use for each patient. Hospital pharmacy services have traditionally had little involvement at the key stages in patients’ hospital care. This leads to the conclusion that the model of clinical pharmacy practice adopted by many pharmacy department hospitals is no longer appropriate for the demands of today’s health‐care services. Reviews many new models proposed for clinical pharmacy practice including an integrated model for providing a pharmaceutical care management approach in the health‐care system. This model is a response to the failures of traditional drug therapy. It is primarily an idea about how health professionals and patient should integrate their work to obtain outcomes important to patients and clinicians.

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.