In today’s evolving pharmacy climate, there is a large amount of conversation around cognitive services, provider status, and a host of other clinical buzz phrases. Amidst all of this, it is important to remember that before anything else, pharmacy is a business, much like everything else in the country. 

As a pharmacist, I perform drug utilization reviews (DURs) every single day. I felt that I had a pretty solid understanding of what they encompass, but while doing the research for this post I learned that there are many, many, different definitions.

In part 1 of this series I briefly wrote about how I initially struggled with the idea of being more clinical in my role as a retail pharmacist, how I overcame those struggles and what I decided to do next…start learning. How I started learning, how I make time to learn and the various tools I use are the things I am going to discuss in this post. 

Clinical Pharmacy vs. Retail Pharmacy; This has long been a source of debate involving practicing pharmacists, pharmacy professors, pharmacy students and sometimes even people outside of the profession. In recent times it seems that schools are pushing students more and more to pursue clinical pharmacy. I hear this all too often from the students I precept or work as interns. It makes sense to me that this is happening since the vast majority of the faculty at pharmacy schools are clinical pharmacists. Recently I started to wonder if there was a possibility that you could do both (without having 2 jobs). Can a pharmacist be a clinical pharmacist and a retail pharmacist simultaneously? The answer I came up with? Certainly.