It's a giant step from the mortar-and-pestle days of making drugs from willow bark and poppies when the University of Cincinnati College of Pharmacy was founded as the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy in 1850 . It's even a sizable leap from the '60s, when alumna Dorothy Smith, PharmD '72, began her career as a pharmacist with strict instructions to never counsel a patient.
"Prescriptions were written in Latin so patients couldn't understand them," says the woman now internationally renowned for patient education. "And we were instructed to never answer a question. If a patient asked about a prescription, we were supposed to refer them to their doctor."
"Pharmacy has moved from a ‘count and pour, lick and stick' profession that has been very product oriented to a profession that puts patients and their quality of life at the center," says Robert E. Lee, associate dean at the college. Dean Daniel Acosta concurs, "Today, pharmacists are dispensing information, as well as medication."
Adding the extra year has created a greater focus on clinical experience. Students spend an entire academic year doing nine one-month rotations, instead of the previous four, at a variety of settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, retail pharmacies, industrial sites, community-service clinics and even mail-order pharmacies.
Opportunities abound because the field has changed so much. Today's graduates may work in a retail site with a robot dispensing medicine 24 hours a day or in the nuclear pharmaceutical field working with radioactive drugs. And those who choose a more traditional career path in a community pharmacy are trained as counselors.
"Patient counseling is written into state laws today," Dean Acosta says. "For all new prescriptions, the pharmacist is supposed to ask the patient if they want to discuss its use and effects. We've been involved in the design of patient counseling centers in a few community pharmacies -- at Kroger's, for example."
Patient education is vital to health care, says alumna Smith, who founded the Consumer Health Information Corp., an internationally recognized patient-education organization near Washington, D.C. "The patient may be the most important member of the health team, because it is the patient who decides if, how and when to take the medication," she says. "If a patient decides a medicine is not worth taking, then the millions of dollars spent to research that treatment has been wasted."
Next page l UC was a forerunner in patient counseling in 1970.
