The 1982 Hoechst Lecture: "Cost effectiveness--the emerging 'bottom line' for pharmacy?!"

In the current climate of budgetary restraint in the health care system, cost effectiveness is a concept which surfaces with increasing frequency, especially in reference to health care services funded by government. Since significant elements of pharmacy services in Canada are thus funded (including in most provinces, hospital pharmacy services, and prescription drug plans for senior citizens), it is important that pharmacy "tune into" the concept, and recognize it as an essential criterion to be met in the maintenance of existing services and in the development of new services. Prerequisite to a consideration of cost effectiveness is, of course, consideration of effectiveness; and a statement about the effectiveness; and a statement about the effectiveness of a service implies a potential for measurement of effect or outcome. In the 1980s, as pharmacy focuses its efforts on patients rather than products, that effect must surely be defined in "people" terms. One of the important dimensions of today's patient-focussed pharmacy services is patient counselling, more broadly, patient education.