Department of Pharmacy, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College
1. Introduction
Founded in 1974, the department of pharmacy is one of comprehensive professional and technical departments integrating hospital pharmacy management, pharmaceutical service, scientific research and teaching in the Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College. Today, the Department has developed into a fully-fledged department including the clinical pharmacist training base of the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, the standardized training base for pharmacists of medical institutions and urgently-needed professionals (clinical pharmacists) in Sichuan Province, the National Drug Clinical Trial Institution, and the National Sentinel Surveillance Institution for Adverse Drug Reactions. And, the Department offers pharmacy dispensing, pharmaceutical preparations, clinical pharmacy and pharmacy management, drug clinical trials, pharmacy intravenous admixture services (PIVAS), and other services.
2. Staff composition
The Department now has 131 pharmaceutical professionals, and boasts its 3 chief pharmacists and 7 associate chief pharmacists, 4 medical doctors, 1 doctoral candidate, 16 master, 4 master's supervisors, and 3 provincial academic and technical leaders and reserve candidates. Moreover, there are eight provincial high-level talents enlisted in the Department, such as members of the Thousand Talents Youth Committee of Chinese Journal of Clinical Pharmacology of Chinese Pharmaceutical Association and Sichuan Medical Association, vice chairman of Pharmacovigilance Professional Committee of Sichuan Traditional Chinese Medicine Association and Sichuan Hospital Association, standing director of Nanchong Traditional Chinese Medicine Association, and members of Quality Control Expert group of Nanchong Pharmaceutical Administration. Meanwhile, three of them in the Department are on the editorial board of China Pharmacy, China Pharmaceuticals, and Journal of North Sichuan Medical College.
3. Operation service
Accumulating 3.6 million prescriptions are dispensed by the western medicine pharmacy, and 82 000 prescriptions by the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy yearly. The clinical pharmacist system was established in 2005. At present, there are 14 full-time clinical pharmacists, working in the department of cardiovascular medicine, respiratory medicine, ICU, emergency department, neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery and other departments of the hospital. And, the duties of these clinical pharmacists mainly involved ward rounds, case discussion, medication education for patients, participation in the formulation of medication regimens, and tracking the whole drug treatment process of patients during their stay in the hospital. According to the statistical results, the number of pharmaceutical consultations in the whole year is more than 4000 cases.
Numerous information platforms, such as rational drug use system, prescription pre-audit system and drug inventory management, were constructed. Simultaneously, the Department has carried out Internet pharmaceutical services, providing online drug prescription review and distribution, dispensing and decoction traditional Chinese medicine, and drug consultation services, etc.
PIVAS of the Department, to be stablished in April 2021, is now the largest PIVAS in Southwest China covering a building area of about 1000 square meters. The clean environment of the distribution operation room is 10,000, and partially reaches 100 in the PIVAS. It is equipped with 12 biological safety cabinets, 18 purification workbenches and 4 logistics robots. Prominently, it passed the evaluation and acceptance of the Special Committee on intravenous delivery of the Sichuan Preventive Medicine Association in June 2022.
The Good Clinical Practice (GCP) Center/Institute of Drug Clinical Trials was approved by the National Medical Products Administration in 2019, and 10 principal investigators have completed the filing. The institutional office belongs to the Department, and engages in the project review, operation and implementation, drug and device, fund and data management, and quality assurance of drug and medical device clinical trials for the purpose of registration in the hospital.
4. Education and training
4.1 Undergraduate education
The Department is responsible for the teaching of undergraduates of the School of Pharmacy of North Sichuan Medical College and the nursing School of Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College every year, and the teaching hours are approximately 230 and 200 hours, respectively. Concurrently, the courses mainly include Biopharmaceutics and Pharmacokinetics, Pharmaceutics, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics, and Pharmaceutical Analysis. Also, the Department undertakes the practice teaching tasks of colleges and technical schools and undergraduates, including pharmacy practice, clinical practice, graduation project design, etc.
4.2 Postgraduate training
The Department has been recruiting postgraduate students since 2015, and currently there are 4 master's supervisor, whose main research directions are pharmacy, pharmacology, and clinical pharmacy.
4.3 Training of clinical pharmacists
Since 2012, The Department have become a clinical pharmacist training base of the National Health Commission, and it now has 4 majors, such as general medicine, anti-infection, ICU and cardiovascular medicine. It recruits clinical pharmacist trainees from medical institutions in China with 15 students annually, and has trained more than 100 trainees.
4.4 Standardized training of pharmacists in medical institutions
Moreover, the Department became a standardized training base for pharmacists of medical institutions in Sichuan Province in 2017, with a faculty size of 15 and an enrollment size of 20 students/year. The training covered prescription review, drug dispensing and distribution, drug management, drug preparation, drug analysis, and drug testing.
5. Scientific Research
In the past five years, 25 research projects have been conducted in the Department, including 3 National Natural Science Foundation of China (Youth Fund), Science & Technology Program of Sichuan Province, and provincial bureau level projects. It has participated in compiling 10 textbooks (monographs), and has published about 100 papers as first authors or corresponding authors in academic journals at home and abroad, including more than 20 SCI papers.