Career Opportunities for Pharm D (Doctor of Pharmacy) or What after Pharm D

Career Opportunities after Pharm D (Doctor of Pharmacy) or What after Pharm D

Many people think about joining the

 

Here a list of top ten career opportunities after Doctor of Pharmacy;

 

1.Clinical Pharmacist after Pharm D: 

The idea of this degree is to provide the students with a status so different that they would get a chance to work as a pharmacist and a doctor. Clinical Pharmacists have the role of optimizing medication, disease prevention, and healthcare. Clinical pharmacists regulate the therapeutic use of drugs. This job profile repays heavily. Not only in India but countries like the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, this job profile has a broad scope. Considering this point, there is a light for opting Doctor of Pharmacy. 

 

2.Clinical Research after Pharm D: 

In hospitals or clinical research organizations, Pharm.D graduates are required to perform different research activities to come up with new solutions. The candidates have different roles in the clinical research sector. 

 

3.Analytical Chemist after Pharm D: 

The analytical chemists study the chemical composition of any matter. It is yet another promising job option that can be unblocked with the help of a Pharm.D degree. To become suitable for the job, the students should be well versed in bioanalysis, forensic science, clinical analysis, and materials analysis. Primarily, the role of an analytical chemist is to study the composition and behavior of different substances. 

 

4.Quality control Officers after Pharm D:

In pharmaceutical companies, there is a post of quality control officer who ensures that every medicine of pharmaceutical products is being made as per the prescribed standards. After a Pharm D degree, the candidates can work as quality control officers in this promising job. 

 

 

5.Medical writer after Pharm D:

It is one of the most recompensing jobs in the field of Pharmacy. With a PharmD degree, the students are eligible to become one. The key roles of a medical writer include working in association with the doctors or personnel from pharmacovigilance, to prepare accurate and cost-effective scientific documents. Medical writers are much desired on the global field. Countries like the US, UK, Canada, etc., receive Pharm D graduates very well. Consequently, by knowing how the candidate exchange program works, the students can go abroad to study. 

 

 

6.Community Pharmacist after Pharm D:

Pharm.D graduates can work as a community pharmacist and play an vital role in uplifting the community health. The community pharmacists impart information about medical drugs and their usage to the people.

 

7.Pharmacovigilance Associate after Pharm D:

Pharm. D associates have different roles during the development and testing of new drugs. Pharmacovigilance associates are also desired by the clinical research organizations to test the adverse drug effects on different patients. In Pharmaceutical industries also, there are openings for Pharmacovigilance associates who keep a check on the safety of drugs being manufactured.

 

8.Pharmacoeconomics researcher after Pharm D: 

It is a discipline that combines the postulates of economics and Pharmacy. Under this study, the cost and effect of one therapeutic drug are compared to another drug. Their evaluations can be categorized as cost-effective and cost-utility.

 

 

9.Drug Inspector after Pharm D: 

Drug inspectors are responsible for licensing and regulating the use, distribution, and sales of drugs. To be a drug inspector, one needs to appear in the relative government exam.

 

10.Teachers/Professors after Pharm D:

For those seeking to join the academic front, Pharm.D can help them very well. After this degree, the candidates can work as teachers in Pharmacy or another related curriculum educational Institutes. The students can also explore the opportunities for further studies in India. 

 

 

              There are lot more Career Opportunities after Pharm D. Pharm D is full of options that have not been explored by many people. It is a very appealing postgraduate degree for those who aspire to pursue something other than degree and Engineering courses. PharmD builds a link between the students and a better, brighter tomorrow. You are believing and deciding that you want to stay in the field for the long term. The instance you choose Pharm D, you mark the initiation of your success story. You can choose your best suitable career after your Pharm.D.

How to choose top notch research work in 5th Pharm D

As far as my knowledge concern, Pharm D 5th year is one such critical stage where the students are supposed to do a project work on areas related to pharmacoepidemeology, Pharmacotherapeutics, Pharmacokietics, Clinical Pharmacy etc.,

The project can be of any type but the key factors to be noted are :

1.Would that be useful for us in building up our resume?

2. Can we learn skills like statistical analysis, result determination, thesis writing?

3. Is our project really show a change in the topic of our interest. If not at least can it cause a change in our level of knowledge?

The title you choose should satisfy all of the above qualities.

Coming to the topics of project, we can do something related to :

1. Comparative studies like between drugs/diseases/Age Vs disease etc.

2. Prescription analysis example compile N number of prescriptions related to your interested variable and start analyzing the results about QOL, Quality of therapy, outcome of treatment etc)

3. Pharmacokinetic studies like You are supposed to tie up with a CRO and collect data of drug trial on patients and analyse the results.

4.Survey based study ( simplest one, prepare a questionnaire of your topic interested and collect responses from patients/Health care providers and analyse the results)

5. Prevalence and incidence studies( choose topic of your interest and collect data from hospitals/community and perform the prevalence of the disease and possible factors)

6. Multi centered studies ( choose more than two hospitals and collect data for the same topic of your choice and analyse the results and determine the reasons behind differences in disease Incidence Rate and therapy outcome)

We have many more to do upon your interest and abilities.

Feel free to comment here for any specific research in case of further clarifications needed.

Defined daily dose

The DDD is the assumed average daily maintenance dose for a drug for its main indication in adults.

Expressed as DDDs per 1000 inhabitants per day, for chronically used drugs

It can be interpreted as the proportion of the population that may receive treatment with a particular medicine on any given day.

For use in hospital settings, the unit is expressed as DDDs per 100 bed-days (adjusted for occupancy rate); it suggests the proportion of inpatients that may receive a DDD.

For medicines that are used for short-term periods, such as antimicrobials, the unit is expressed as DDDs per inhabitant per year; this provides an estimate of the number of days for which each person is treated with a particular medication in a year.

The defined daily dose (DDD) methodology was developed in response to the need to convert and standardize readily available volume data from sales statistics or pharmacy inventory data into medically meaningful units, to make crude estimates of the number of persons exposed to a particular medicine or class of medicines.

The DDD methodology is useful for working with readily available gross drug statistics and is relatively easy and inexpensive to use. However, the DDD methodology should

be used and interpreted with caution. The DDD is not a recommended or a prescribed dose, but a technical unit of comparison; it is usually the result of literature review and available information on use in various countries.

Prescribed daily dose

The prescribed daily dose (PDD) is another unit, developed as a means to validate the DDDs. The PDD is the average daily dose prescribed, as obtained from a representative sample of prescriptions.

Not useful to estimate incidence and prevalence of drug use or to quantify or identify patients who receive doses lower or higher than those considered effective and safe.

DRUG UTILIZATION REVIEW

Drug utilization review (DUR) programs have been defined as “structured, ongoing initiatives that interpret patterns of drug use in relation to predetermined criteria, and attempt to prevent or minimize inappropriate prescribing.”

DUR programs differ from drug utilization studies, which are time-limited investigations that measure drug use, but do not necessarily assess appropriateness or attempt to change practice.

Recently, the use of clinical decision support within computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE) programs has risen dramatically. The use of such programs to improve prescribing can be considered a form of prospective DUR in which prescribers are the targets of interventions

Generally, the DUR process involves comparing actual behavior to explicit, prospectively established standards, referred to as criteria. For example, a commonly used criterion is that patients should not receive more than one non steroidal anti-inflammatory agent at any one time. Criteria have been developed to identify the following types of problems: drug–drug interactions, drug–disease interactions, drug–age interactions, drug–allergy interactions, use of too high or too low a dose, duplication of therapeutic class, excessive duration of therapy, obtaining prescription refills sooner or later than should be needed, failure to prescribe a known effective agent in patients with certain conditions, abuse of psychoactive medications, and use of a more costly agent when a less costly agent is available. After developing criteria, the next step in the DUR process is to measure adherence to explicit criteria by examining individual-level data. Instances in which medication use does not agree with criteria are called exceptions.

Next, interventions are implemented where appropriate, often following an implicit review. Although the general model for DUR does not require that practitioners be made aware of individual exceptions occurring in their patients (that is, interventions can be made based on aggregate rather than individual findings), this step usually involves alerting the physician and/or pharmacy of record as to the occurrence of the specific exception.

There are different settings in which the DUR model is applied.

Outpatient retrospective DUR programs use

computerized administrative data (i.e., pharmacy and medical claims data maintained for billing and other administrative purposes) to identify exceptions that are then reviewed by a physician or pharmacist, or by a committee of health professionals, and result in an intervention (e.g., a mailed alert letter to the physician). The alert letter typically describes the DUR program and the criterion, and provides literature references supporting the criterion and a patient profile demonstrating that the criterion was violated.

Meta Ananlysis

Meta –analysis is a method which can be used to combine the results of two or more studies. The first Meta –analysis performed by karlpearson in 1904

Meta –analysis may conveniently be defined as a quantitative method of pooling information from independent studies concerning a single theme in order to draw conclusion.

Meta –analysis does not simply involve averaging the results of the individual studies, but requires a statistical method which combines the result whilst taking into account the size of the studies. Thus Meta –analysis is the statistical analysis of a large collection of analysis results for the purpose of integrating the findings.

Meta –analysis can provide researchers with single pooled results to answer whether treatment A is more beneficial than treatment B. This pooled result is usually more precise than the result from the individual studies. The precision with each of these studies calculates the treatment effect depends on many factors including the number of people in the study. Generally as the number of people increases in a study the precision of the treatment effect will increase.

Therefore by statistical combining the all the sample size together from the individual studies, the precision of our pooled result for the treatment effect can be improved.

Meta – analysis increases power. By combining the results from the smaller studies using Meta– analysis we can increase the overall power of the analysis. Therefore, the results from a Meta – analysis will usually have more power than the results from the individual studies.

STEPS TO PERFORM META – ANALYSIS

The theoretical  relationship of interest

Collect the population of studies that provide data on the relationship.

Code the studies and compute the effect sizes

Examine the distribution of effect sizes and analyze the impact of moderating variables

Interpret and report the results.

SUMMARY

 Meta – analysis leads to a shift of emphasis from single studies to multiple studies. It is performed with assistance of computer data bases (Microsoft access, paradox) and statistical software (DSTAT, SAS). The most common use of Meta – analysis has been in quantitative literature review. A valid meta – analysis however, require careful planning in the protocol stage as for any other research.