Should Doctors Consult with Pharmacists before Prescribing Medicine?

Any time you get new Canadian prescriptions, they have to be recommended by your doctor. He or she is the one that knows your medical history and what it may suggest about your current conditions. However, doctors do not always know everything they need to know about certain medications. There are times when pharmacists are a more reliable source of information for certain medications simply because that is what they are trained to know about. They have the background of training required to understand drugs to their full extent. Should doctors, then, be required to consult with pharmacists about their prescriptions? Let’s weigh out the pros and cons.

A consultation for Canadian prescriptions is needed a lot of times anyways when a doctor doesn’t know the full details about something he may need to prescribe. These are often questions about medical complications that may cause harmful results. While this is beneficial in the long run, is it something that should be a necessity? Should there actually be a rule stating that a prescription cannot be filled without the consent of a pharmacist?

One of the problems that may arise in making it a requirement is when doctors actually do know enough about the Canadian prescriptions to give them, out to the patients. By having a pharmacist look over something unnecessarily, the system would be slowing down work flow and costing a great deal of money in labour. Thus this may not be the wisest idea from a financial perspective because consumers will end up having to front the costs. When this is not a possibility, the government may be forced to implement unwanted taxes just to cover the costs for extra consultants. A slew of problems may arise from there.

Perhaps the requirement isn’t necessary then. Patients can always get a second opinion about their Canadian prescriptions from their pharmacist, and they can make decisions from there. Doctors will still need pharmacists from time to time just to bounce ideas off them, but in the end, the doctors do fairly well on their own. Most pharmacists will notice if a dosage or prescription is blatantly wrong, and they will then call the doctor before giving out the drugs. Thus there is a check system involved, even if it is not set in stone. As long as everyone does their jobs individually, the process should work as a whole.