#TalkingIsLegal
- Not Practicing..!
Pharmacy Practice is increasingly labelled as “illegal,” but this argument reflects a policy vacuum rather than a professional failure.
The real issue is not the teaching of Pharmacy Practice or PharmaCare, but the absence of a comprehensive legal framework that clearly defines and integrates the pharmacist’s patient-care role within India’s healthcare system.
Healthcare today is medicine-intensive. Polypharmacy, chronic diseases, ageing populations, and medication-related harm are now routine.
Regulating medicines as products alone is no longer sufficient. Modern healthcare requires PharmaCare-oriented professional practice, where pharmacists are trained and accountable for medication safety, therapy monitoring, patient counselling, continuity of care, and systems-based interventions that directly influence outcomes.
Insisting that the law must evolve before professional capacity is built reverses the natural order of health-system development.
Across health professions, education has always anticipated emerging roles long before statutes formally recognised them.
Pharmacy Practice and PharmaCare education preparing pharmacists for structured patient-care responsibilities is therefore is legitimate and is necessary and forward-looking.
The confusion arises from India’s fragmented legal framework. The pharmacist’s role is scattered across the Pharmacy Act and the Drugs & Cosmetics Act, with no single statute clearly defining pharmacists as accountable patient-care professionals or formal providers of PharmaCare service within the healthcare team.
This legal silence enables misinterpretation, under-utilisation of trained pharmacists, and the mistaken branding of structured professional education as “unauthorised practice.”
What India urgently needs is a comprehensive Pharmacy Practice Act that formally recognises and regulates PharmaCare, clearly defining scope, responsibility, accountability, and collaborative boundaries.
Such legislation would align education with practice, strengthen patient safety, reduce medication-related harm, and integrate pharmacists meaningfully into healthcare delivery.
Suppressing Pharmacy Practice and PharmaCare education will not improve safety; it will only widen the gap between healthcare needs and system capacity.
The real policy question is not why these competencies are being taught, but why regulation has not yet been put in place to keep pace with the realities of modern healthcare.?
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#PharmacyEducation #ClinicalPharmacy
#AIPDA
#APTI
#PharmacistsInHealthcare
#PCI #NMC #CDSCO #DTAB #MinistryOfHealth
Pov: Bhagwan PS
