If you’re considering a move into a healthcare career, you have likely considered the option of a career in clinical pharmacology. It’s easy to see why; this career is a varied and interesting one, not least because it focuses on both the technical side of dispensing medication and the human side of it – and even the legal and financial side. Here is a look at the various usages and purposes of clinical pharmacology and why it might make for an appealing career.
What is a discipline?
Before looking specifically at what clinical pharmacology is and its purposes, it’s useful to explore the concept of a discipline itself. In the medical training world, a discipline can be understood as a way of gathering together the disparate parts of a way of doing things and grouping them into sets in which a person can undergo training on.
Nursing, in this sense, can be seen as a discipline that is primarily responsible for frontline patient healthcare and comfort. In this sense, clinical pharmacology can usefully be understood as a set of tools that does a specific set of things.
What is the goal of clinical pharmacology?
As a starting point, clinical pharmacology looks to ensure that drugs are used in a safe manner. Clinical pharmacologists will be responsible for the protocols used in a particular clinic or hospital environment. For example, they will regularly undertake reviews of which medication is stored in which environment and how it can be effectively dispensed. This will require teamwork; a clinical pharmacologist is likely to work with nurses, for example, to ensure that the medication they dispense is used safely and stored correctly.
Another role is financial in nature. A clinical pharmacologist is often also responsible for ensuring that the drugs patients take are a good value for the care provider. It is worth remembering that it is an ethical violation for clinicians to make decisions about how to treat patients based on either real or perceived economic issues; patient care has to come first. However, clinical pharmacologists can bridge this gap by providing a care-based analysis of the cost of medications and use their medical knowledge to evaluate patient outcomes as well as their financial skills to evaluate the costs involved.
How drugs interact with each other is also a key factor to consider as a clinical pharmacologist. When a person comes into a hospital suffering from the complications of taking medications, a clinical pharmacologist will need to read over their clinical history to find out what medical conditions they suffer from and what drugs they take. It is crucial to consider how the different drugs they are taking are likely to interact with each other if they continue to be consumed.
It is the role of the clinical pharmacologist to ensure that one drug doesn’t have an adverse effect on another. This can often require a major time investment on the part of the clinical pharmacologist as few patients have exactly the same profile, medical history and exact combination of drugs and conditions.
Is it very specialist?
However, it is important to note that not all clinical pharmacologists specialize to this extent. It’s also not out of the question for a person with a clinical pharmacology qualification to spend most of their time practicing medicine generally, as long as they also have the relevant qualifications. They may work in an emergency room treating patients who enter on an urgent care basis, for example, or as a consultant physician in a certain area of medicine. Their clinical pharmacology qualification may just be a particular specialty of theirs, among many others.
Nevertheless, it is likely that someone with a clinical pharmacology degree will spend most of their time in specific parts of the hospital or clinic. One such location they’re likely to find themselves in is the toxicology department. It’s a sad reality that many patients who cross the doors of this department have done so because of poisoning complexities that have arisen from the consumption of medicines or other drugs. As a clinical pharmacologist, it’s your job to determine what has happened to the patient and what effect the pharmaceuticals in question have had on them.
From there, it will usually be essential to put them on a pharmaceutical treatment plan that doesn’t cause their internal organs or body any further damage. This requires several skills. For example, it calls for the use of specialist medical knowledge about the way that the precise chemistry of particular drugs affect specific parts of the body, and it will also call for therapeutic decision making that assesses what is in the patient’s best interest. It is in this context that clinical pharmacology can best be understood as a diverse discipline that takes into account – and requires – several different skills and approaches.
What about the legal aspects?
It is also important to consider the part of clinical pharmacology that deals with regulations and the law. Because drugs can have profound effects on patients, their use is subject to stringent regulations and licensing laws. Some of these are laid out in legalization, while others come from organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration.
Every hospital and clinic that deals with patients and gives out medication has to ensure that it is sticking to the rules or they could find themselves jeopardizing patient safety and facing legal consequences. In this sense, the role of the clinical pharmacologist can be understood partly as a legal defense unit as well as a purely medical or clinical position – making the role even more interesting to hold.
A clinical pharmacologist uses their specialist knowledge and skills to make sure that the healthcare setting is covering all bases and applying medication and prescriptions in a compliant way. This involves knowledge of the drugs in question as well as knowledge of the law – and, crucially, the ability to stay on top of regulations that change on a fairly regular basis, especially as new drugs come to the market following successful clinical trials. Understanding the life cycle of a drug’s market position is just as important as knowing what effect that drug can have on the people who take it or need it in order to live healthy and fulfilling lives.
Clinical pharmacology as a career goal
With such a varied set of requirements and aims involved, clinical pharmacology is clearly a strong contender if you’re thinking about specializing in a particular area of medicine. While you can certainly become a physician who specializes in this area, you can also build clinical pharmacology expertise in other medical professions. For example, the FNP program online at Walsh University allows those who are thinking about specializing in family nursing to study a module in clinical pharmacology, which is ideal for those who want to enhance skills in this area without going down the full physician qualification route.
There are multiple routes that a person interested in clinical pharmacology can take. Many people who enter clinical pharmacology practice in a healthcare setting. For example, they may decide that they wish to work in a hospital, doing the sort of work outlined above. However, clinical pharmacologists can also work in a research environment. In this context, they may find themselves working on tasks such as analyzing quantitative toxicology report data from different healthcare settings to find higher-level trends. To a certain degree, there is flexibility in this role; a clinical pharmacologist may decide later in their career that they want to move from clinical practice to research, or vice versa.
Conclusion
Clinical pharmacology has a clear purpose: to exist as a discipline that straddles the gap between the legal, clinical and money-focused sides of the practice of dispensing medication. From the way in which people in this field are required to balance financial and medical considerations to the flexibility on offer in terms of training and development, this is a career that deserves to be considered by anyone who is on the medical training route.
