Establishing an active patient partnership

Pharmacists face many changes in the coming decade, some of which threaten their professional survival. Although uncertainty may currently prevail, one of these changes, the shift in the patient-health care professional relationship from the patient taking a passive role to an active partnering role, provides pharmacists with many opportunities to realize the vision of patient-centered care that has been advocated by pharmacy innovators and leaders for almost three decades. To take advantage of these changes, pharmacists must modify their practice paradigms and use their existing strengths, such as easy patient access and high levels of patient trust, to help develop a new model of pharmaceutical care. The concern that the magnitude of these changes will prevent successful practice transformations may be exaggerated. In reality, these proposed "new" roles have been in existence for much of this century. Most pharmacists can expand and enhance their traditional roles as self-care advisors and patient educators simply by incremental improvements in interpersonal and clinical skills. Rather than a Star Trek approach to "go where no man has gone before," the profession needs only a pharmaceutical sequel to Back to the Future.