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Pharmacists and COVID-19
In the fight against COVID-19, frontline health workers have been vital to keeping the pandemic at bay, but recognition of individual professions’ efforts have been inconsistent at all levels. Pharmacists around the world have continued to provide direct patient care and perform frontline duties for...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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BioMed Central
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7303584/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32572350 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40545-020-00241-3 |
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author | Elbeddini, Ali Prabaharan, Thulasika Almasalkhi, Sarah Tran, Cindy |
author_facet | Elbeddini, Ali Prabaharan, Thulasika Almasalkhi, Sarah Tran, Cindy |
author_sort | Elbeddini, Ali |
collection | PubMed |
description | In the fight against COVID-19, frontline health workers have been vital to keeping the pandemic at bay, but recognition of individual professions’ efforts have been inconsistent at all levels. Pharmacists around the world have continued to provide direct patient care and perform frontline duties for their communities during this pandemic, but are often relegated to the background and overlooked when frontline workers are heralded. Community pharmacists are the most accessible healthcare practitioners, which is further proven during the pandemic as they continued to provide direct patient care despite restrictions imposed by the government due to the pandemic. Due to the inaccessibility of other healthcare practitioners during this time, community pharmacists have reduced the burden on the healthcare system by diverting the influx of patients away from hospitals through triaging and screening patients. Community pharmacists have played various roles in supporting the healthcare system during COVID-19: delivering medications to patients, educating patients on telehealth services, assessing patients for renewal of chronic medications, performing consultations on minor ailments, clarifying misconceptions about COVID-19 treatments, and contributing to COVID-19 screening. Alongside ICU nurses, physicians, and respiratory therapists, hospital pharmacists have been part of the COVID-19 efforts and their roles include management of drug shortages, development of treatment protocols, participation of patient rounds, interpretation of lab results for COVID-19, participant recruitment for clinical trials, exploration of new drugs, medication management advice, and antimicrobial stewardship. Further support from pharmacists will be needed once a vaccine is launched in order to reach population-wide coverage. Amid COVID-19, pharmacists have not stopped working as frontline workers and they should be recognized as such. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7303584 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-73035842020-06-19 Pharmacists and COVID-19 Elbeddini, Ali Prabaharan, Thulasika Almasalkhi, Sarah Tran, Cindy J Pharm Policy Pract Commentary In the fight against COVID-19, frontline health workers have been vital to keeping the pandemic at bay, but recognition of individual professions’ efforts have been inconsistent at all levels. Pharmacists around the world have continued to provide direct patient care and perform frontline duties for their communities during this pandemic, but are often relegated to the background and overlooked when frontline workers are heralded. Community pharmacists are the most accessible healthcare practitioners, which is further proven during the pandemic as they continued to provide direct patient care despite restrictions imposed by the government due to the pandemic. Due to the inaccessibility of other healthcare practitioners during this time, community pharmacists have reduced the burden on the healthcare system by diverting the influx of patients away from hospitals through triaging and screening patients. Community pharmacists have played various roles in supporting the healthcare system during COVID-19: delivering medications to patients, educating patients on telehealth services, assessing patients for renewal of chronic medications, performing consultations on minor ailments, clarifying misconceptions about COVID-19 treatments, and contributing to COVID-19 screening. Alongside ICU nurses, physicians, and respiratory therapists, hospital pharmacists have been part of the COVID-19 efforts and their roles include management of drug shortages, development of treatment protocols, participation of patient rounds, interpretation of lab results for COVID-19, participant recruitment for clinical trials, exploration of new drugs, medication management advice, and antimicrobial stewardship. Further support from pharmacists will be needed once a vaccine is launched in order to reach population-wide coverage. Amid COVID-19, pharmacists have not stopped working as frontline workers and they should be recognized as such. BioMed Central 2020-06-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7303584/ /pubmed/32572350 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40545-020-00241-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Commentary Elbeddini, Ali Prabaharan, Thulasika Almasalkhi, Sarah Tran, Cindy Pharmacists and COVID-19 |
title | Pharmacists and COVID-19 |
title_full | Pharmacists and COVID-19 |
title_fullStr | Pharmacists and COVID-19 |
title_full_unstemmed | Pharmacists and COVID-19 |
title_short | Pharmacists and COVID-19 |
title_sort | pharmacists and covid-19 |
topic | Commentary |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7303584/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32572350 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40545-020-00241-3 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT elbeddiniali pharmacistsandcovid19 AT prabaharanthulasika pharmacistsandcovid19 AT almasalkhisarah pharmacistsandcovid19 AT trancindy pharmacistsandcovid19 |