Jeroen van de Pol

9 General introduction 1 disease interactions) have been adequately addressed. Also, the community pharmacists checks, when applicable, if appropriate information and counseling has been provided to the patient [4]. The community pharmacist has multiple tasks in daily community pharmacy practice, such as the organization and management of the community pharmacy, managing the dispensing process, adequate stock keeping, finances and quality management. Next to such activities, the community pharmacist provides cognitive pharmaceutical services (CPS) such as clinical medication reviews, home-visits after hospital discharge and pharmacotherapy audit meetings with prescribers. Cognitive Pharmaceutical Services Cipolle et al. defined care related services provided by pharmacists as ‘Cognitive Pharmaceutical Services’ (CPS) [5]. The definition is ‘ the use of specialized knowledge by the pharmacist for the patient or health professionals for the purpose of promoting effective and safe drug therapy’. This definition explicitly implies that the role of the community pharmacists goes beyond the dispensing of medicines and even beyond basic clinical risk management such as checks on drug-drug interactions and contra-indications. CPS aims to improve patients’ quality of life by ensuring safe and effective medication use tailored to patient’ needs. Community pharmacists provide a wide range of CPS that can focus on different healthcare conditions [6-12]. One example of these services is the pharmacist led medication review [13]. The pharmacist led medication review is a service in collaboration with the GP to identify drug related problems (DRPs) and optimizing therapy for patients. Based on patient’ needs, focus can be put on personal goals of patients using goal attainment scaling (GAS) [14]. Other examples are the community pharmacist conducting a home-visit after patients get discharged from the hospital [15], services to improve medication adherence [16], but also activities like pharmacotherapy audit meetings [17] that do not include direct patient contact are considered CPS concerning the definition of Cipolle [5]. Transition of community pharmacy practice Community pharmacy practice has seen multiple transitions over the last century. At first, the profession focused on compounding and dispensing. From the 1920s, the profession was increasingly questioning its own professional standing with the introduction of large scale premanufactured medicines. From the 1950s, multiple new medicine discoveries have been made putting more and more emphasis on dispensing and less on compounding. This motivated the first patient-care