Jeroen van de Pol

8 Chapter 1 Community pharmacy practice in the Netherlands Community pharmacies in the Netherlands are positioned at a crossroad where two main responsibilities of community pharmacists within the healthcare system meet [1]: (1) the safe distribution of medicines to patients and (2) the provision of adequate support to patients in order to ensure effective and safe use of medicines (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Community pharmacy practice at the crossroad of supply and the provision of care [2]. A community pharmacist holds full responsibility for the quality and outcome of all processes within the pharmacy according to professional guidelines and Dutch law [1]. However, due to the number of patients a community pharmacy serves (the average patient population for a community pharmacy in The Netherlands is 8,000) [3], a single community pharmacist is unable to perform these tasks alone. Depending on the size of the community pharmacy, roughly four pharmacy technicians support the pharmacist on a workday and in some cases, the community pharmacist is supported by an additional (secondary) pharmacist (mostly called a locum pharmacist). Although officially only the registered community pharmacist is allowed to dispense prescription medicines, in daily clinical practice locum pharmacists and pharmacy technicians will dispense medicines and counsel patients under the supervision of a registered community pharmacist. Community pharmacist perform a mandatory final check on every prescription that has been processed within the community pharmacy. During this final check, the community pharmacist will check whether the appropriate medicine has been dispensed and potential clinical risks (e.g. drug-drug or drug-