<b>Should Pharmacists Prescribe: Rethinking Access, Authority, and the Future of Healthcare.</b>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractAs healthcare systems worldwide grapple with physician shortages, rising chronic disease burdens, and inequitable access to care, expanding the role of pharmacists to include prescribing authority has emerged as a pivotal solution. This opinion paper argues that pharmacist prescribing when supported by rigorous training, interprofessional collaboration, and robust legal frameworks can enhance healthcare accessibility without compromising safety or professional integrity. Drawing on global examples from Canada, Nigeria, the United States, and the Netherlands, the article explores both the transformative potential and the systemic barriers of pharmacist-led prescribing models. Public support for expanded roles, coupled with successful international case studies, underscores the urgency of policy reform. Ultimately, empowering pharmacists to prescribe represents not only an opportunity to alleviate healthcare disparities but a necessary evolution in modern healthcare delivery.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".