The Pharmacy
The mission of the Pharmacy Department is to promote that all of a patient’s drug therapy is appropriately indicated, the most effective available, the safest, and convenient for patients. Our most important values are providing professional excellence in pharmacy practice, education and training, research and development as well as quality dispensing routines. The Department incorporates Inpatient, Outpatient, ER and Discharge Services serving over one thousand UD beds currently and approximately three thousands outpatients daily in the Southern Taiwan. Besides, the ER pharmacy situated in the newly constructed ER building offers 24-hours round the clock shifting service. Our hospital is proud of our chronic disease prescription refill card system and being the founder who has used the bar-code technology for computerized prescription entry system in Taiwan since 1990.
Scope of Practice
Inpatient pharmacy services consist of decentralized unit-dose drug distribution system managed by the satellite pharmacy on each floor and centralized service for reconstitution of drug admixture. These include chemotherapy preparation, total parenteral nutrition and patient controlled analgesia prepared in basement central pharmacy. Clinical pharmacy services, which aim to identify, resolve and prevent drug therapy problem, include patient counseling, pharmacokinetic dosing service for the therapeutic drug monitoring, drug utilization evaluation, drug information service for medical colleagues, adverse drug reaction reporting and monitoring, clinical intervention and prescription drug profile review, etc. In addition, fulltime clinical pharmacists are actively involved with the Internal Medicine, Surgical Medicine, Neurological and Cardiovascular Intensive Care Units and attend their morning ward round on a daily basis.
Pharmacist Competence
At present, the Department includes fourteen pharmacists who obtained Master Degree qualifications in a broad range of pharmacy related knowledge i.e. Clinical Pharmacy, Clinical Pharmacokinetics, Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmaceutics, Basic Medical Science, Biology and Business Administration. Nine of them have been also granted the lectureship and the Department Director was granted Associate Professorship by the Ministry of Education, ROC. The National Defense Medical Center, ROC., having an academic cooperative contract with our hospital, grants the Clinical Assistant Professorship for our two chief pharmacists and Clinical Professorship for the Department Director. More than 90% of our registered pharmacists have a Bachelor Degree of Pharmacy. Pharmacists are encouraged to study the postgraduate school and upgrade their professional competence. Currently, there are two PhD postgraduates and five Master degree postgraduates within the department.
Education and Training
Our teaching activities include pharmacy student internship, weekly seminars, monthly continuing education and training for the department and weekly inter-hospital clinical pharmacist meeting, inter-department pharmacy education for nurses and in the intensive care units and 24-hours continuing education program for the community pharmacists. We accept pharmacy students from Medical Center, Medical University and the College of Pharmacy i.e. National Defense Medical Center in Taipei, Kaohsiung Medical University, College of Pharmacy of the Tajen Institute of Technology and the Chia Nan University of Pharmacy & Science, etc.
Research and Development
Annual research funding granted by the hospital authority has been provided variety of opportunities to enhance the quality of the research in drug utilization evaluation, clinical pharmacy, pharmaceutical science, pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics. Several research articles have been published in the international (SCI) journals, domestic journals and poster presentations for annual academic symposia of pharmacy associations. We are also accountable for the investigational drug storage and management in accordance with the Good Clinical Practice.
Committee
The department maintains a close professional working relationship with other medical care providers as a team. The Pharmacy Director is executive secretary to the Pharmacy Committee. Other pharmacists maintain membership on a number of multidisciplinary committees, e.g., Infection Control Committee, Nutrition Support Team, Clinical Pathway Team, Patient Satisfactory Improving Team, Patient Safety Committee, Adverse Drug Reaction Team.