MIND NURTURE KRISHNA Page 1 of 2

PHARMACY AS A CAREER

1. Practice setting
i) Community pharmacy-
• Community pharmacy. A community pharmacy is a pharmacy that deals directly with
people in the local area. It has responsibilities including compounding, counseling, checking
and dispensing of prescription drugs to the patients with care, accuracy, and legality.
ii) Hospital Pharmacy-
• Hospital pharmacy is the health care service, which comprises the art, practice, and
profession of choosing, preparing, storing, compounding, and dispensing medicines and
medical devices, advising patients, doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals on
their safe, effective and efficient use.
iii) Clinical pharmacy-
• Clinical pharmacists work directly with physicians, other health professionals, and patients
to ensure that the medications prescribed for patients contribute to the best possible
health outcomes.
2. Pharmaceutical Industries
i) Pharmaceutical Marketing-
• Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical marketing involves all of the promotional activities carried
out by an organisation to make pharmaceutical products and care a reality, and available to
customers (patients and other decision makers) from the manufacturer.
ii) Quality Assurance
• The purpose of pharmaceutical quality assurance is to ensure that the medication being
manufactured will provide the desired effect to the patient.
• Quality assurance also guarantees that there are no contaminants present and that the
medications will meet quality requirements and all relevant regulations
iii) Production-
• Responsible for organizing resources and activities required to produce pharmaceutical
products in order to keep the smoothness of the operation and deliver quality products in
timely manner.
iv) Packaging-
• Pharmaceutical packaging (or drug packaging) is the packages and the packaging processes
for pharmaceutical preparations. It involves all of the operations from production through
drug distribution channels to the end consumer
 MIND NURTURE KRISHNA Page 2 of 2

v) Regulatory-
• Regulatory pharmacists help ensure that drugs and medical products meet certain
regulations before they are put on the market.
• They handle all of the red tape that goes into a successful release of a drug.
• They coordinate with pharmaceutical companies and scientists to facilitate drug research,
plan drug trials and review and interpret scientific report data.
• They also apply for approvals and permits from the Food and Drug Administration. They
might also coordinate with international regulatory offices as well.
vi) Research and development
• Pharmacists provide an invaluable interface in this process by establishing working
relationship between scientists and clinicians across the development arena. During the
discovery research phase of development of a medicine pharmacists will work with other
scientists to develop and select drug compounds that may be valuable as medicines
vii) Quality control-
• Pharmaceutical QC aims at investigating manufactured drug products according to
compendial specifications and standards to monitor that they are of the required quality.
QC is concerned with setting up specifications, drawing samples, testing them, and
generating documentation related to the tests and their reports
3. Other settings
i) Academics-
• Academic Pharmacists are full-time faculty members of an educational institute (e.g.
University, Polytechnic, etc.). They are involved in teaching and training of the future
generations of pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists. Besides teaching, academic
pharmacists in a university also engage in research
ii) Regulatory-
• Also known as government pharmacy, regulatory pharmacy is responsible for creating rules
and regulations for the safe use of medicine to promote positive health outcomes. This
includes pharmacists working in public health and regulatory health boards, such as the
Food and Drug Administration in the United States.