An ambulatory care Pharmacist is an integral member of the healthcare team. Ambulatory Care Pharmacists are clinical Pharmacists, medication experts who partner with patients to help improve the patients’ health. Ambulatory Care Pharmacist acts as a patient advocate, the medication therapy management, promotes wellness, helps educate, helps patients self-manage their chronic disease.
What does ambulatory mean?
Ambulatory care is provided in settings such as dialysis clinics, ambulatory surgical centers, hospital outpatient departments, and the offices of physicians and other health professionals.
Ambulatory Care Pharmacists can be your Community or retail Pharmacist, they can also provide the same kinds of services often refer as Medication Therapy Management.
What is Ambulatory Care Pharmacy?
The following statement was developed by a joint task force of the American Pharmacists
Association (APhA), the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), and the
American College of Clinical Pharmacy (ACCP):
Ambulatory care pharmacy practice is the provision of integrated, accessible health care services by pharmacists who are accountable for addressing medication needs, developing sustained partnerships with patients, and practicing in the context of family and community. This is accomplished through direct patient care and medication management for ambulatory patients, long-term relationships, coordination of care, patient advocacy, wellness, and health promotion, triage and referral, and patient education and self-management. The ambulatory care pharmacists may work in both an institutional and community-based clinic involved in the direct care of a diverse patient population.
Do you know what an Ambulatory Care Pharmacist is?
Most people do not know what an Ambulatory Care Pharmacist does, making it hard when you want to help patients. Most patients do not take advantage of the services we provide because they do not know about them.
When I’m asked what do I do? I tell people that I am an ambulatory Clinical Care Pharmacist, they don’t know what I do. Often in the clinic, patients will refer to me as a Nurse and I find myself telling them that I am a Pharmacist. At other times people will ask if I see only patients like them or do I see other patients with different kinds of illnesses.
It is hard when even my family doesn’t really know what I do, how can I expect others to know. While some of the definitions and the places where we work are different than the local Pharmacy, Pharmacists are providing some of the same services they have always provided with a more focus on services. Pharmacy is a profession rich in history, it is in the last 40-50 years that pharmacy became known solely as a dispenser of medications.
Services Provided by ambulatory Care Pharmacist
- Improving clinical and economic outcomes
- Optimizing safe medication use
- Optimizing diabetes care
- Optimizing asthma care
- Optimizing COPD
- Optimizing cardiovascular disease care
- Optimizing renal disease care
- Optimizing preventive care
- Implementing precision therapeutics
- Expanding medication therapy management
- And many more areas
As an Ambulatory Care Pharmacist is my goal to partner with the patient to provide patient center care by managing the patient medication therapy, being a patient advocate, providing health education, guide self-management of chronic diseases, and promote health wellness.
