Some things have of course moved on, especially with internet pharmacies and electronic dispensing in both hospitals and community locations, but much remains for these to be fully exploited, Selleckchem Talazoparib and of course researched. So my first prediction for the next decade is that we will see the benefits of IT for delivering safer, more convenient, more effective and more efficient health care. This should free up that elusive extra time all healthcare professionals need to undertake new duties resulting from changing

demographic profiles in much of the developed world, better understanding of disease processes based on research by our more biomedical colleagues, availability of ever-more effective treatments and the blurring of professional boundaries. Thus in the field of medicines and the working environment of pharmacy we should see non-medical prescribing, including by pharmacists, more widely established, across and beyond the UK, new approaches to the management of long-term conditions, with people retained PD-166866 research buy in their homes for longer, and the achievement of that much-aspired-to holy grail of the compression of morbidity:

living longer at full quality of life due to prevention or good management of long-term disease, including the big two ones of cancer and coronary heart disease. What else will this decade bring? I have two more issues to raise. I previously mentioned safety as an outcome of better IT support; this might come from appropriate medication choice targeted to the individual including

individualised pharmacogenomic approaches, automated supply of medicines minimising human error at the point of drug ‘picking’ ID-8 during the dispensing process and use of routinely acquired data to inform epidemiological study and enhanced pharmacovigilance. However, there remain many steps in the decision and supply chain required to assure ourselves that all preventable risks to safety are eliminated. Sadly there is not necessarily going to be a technological solution to all of these and already we are enlisting the intellectual help of our colleagues from other disciplines, such as psychology, who will help us find the key to helping understanding why safety issues still arise. The recent report on junior doctor prescribing commissioned by the UK General Medical Council serves to highlight the potential for mistakes just at the point of prescribing which are due to human frailty; beyond that there is the dispensing process and then of course there is the increasingly complex perspective of the patient to be studied.