Malaysian Pharmacists’ Involvement in Pharmaceutical Care: A Narrative Review

Pharmacists’ role has been diversified from dispensing medications to patient care. At present there is no collation of such information related to Malaysian pharmacists. This review explores the scope of involvement of pharmacists in pharmaceutical care (PC) services in Malaysia and the outcomes achieved. Articles published between 1990 - Feb 2017 were searched from Science Direct, MEDLINE (PubMed and Ovid), The Cochrane Library and Google Scholar. From 62 records, 17 articles met the selection criteria. Nine articles reported studies related to diabetes mellitus (DM); DM medication therapy adherence clinic, home medication review, patient education program and PC model. The most common services provided by the pharmacists were patient education or counselling and assessing patient’s medication adherence. In 9 studies which were conducted among diabetes patients, pharmacists’ intervention caused significant decrease in HbA1c, fasting blood glucose and/or lipid profile values. While medication adherence was reported to be significantly improved in 10 studies. Pharmacist’s interventions were also found to have improved patients knowledge and quality of life as reported in 5 studies. In addition 4 studies reported significant positive economic outcomes. This study revealed that Malaysian pharmacist’s involvement had positive impacts in clinical, humanistic and economic outcomes. Many studies focussed on one particular medical condition – diabetes mellitus. More studies should be conducted involving pharmacists from other settings and in different patient populations.

Pharmaceutical care; Malaysia pharmacists; Medication therapy adherence clinic (MTAC)