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As noted by Roman poet Virgil already more than 2,000 years ago: “The greatest wealth is health.”. Without health, there is no happiness, no peace, and no success according to the Reflections Recovery Center from Arizona, United States (USA, U.S.). The goal of the Healthy People 2020-project (HP2020), which is led by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP), was to “promote quality life, healthy development, and health behaviors across all life stages” among the U.S. population. HP2020 measures progress by using so-called Leading Health Indicators (LHI), reliable data sources, baseline values as well as targets for LHI-individual improvements for every measurable objective to be achieved by 2020 and each following decade. In the further course, these values were compared to student populations from the U.S., Germany, and Poland. The goal of this master's thesis was to obtain more data on international health, particularly among student populations. For the statistical analysis, data were obtained from an online survey that was distributed to students in at least one university in each of the three countries. In total, data from 380 students were analyzed in terms of HP2020 goal attainment. To determine if statistically significant differences were present, the z-test was used. The biggest differences emerged on the following topics: access to healthcare, environmental quality, obesity as well as reproductive and sexual health.
Background: The mission of the pharmacy profession is to improve public health through ensuring safe, effective, and appropriate use of medications. Population health management (PHP) is a process wherein opportunities are identified to improve the quality of health care delivered and thereby, promote better health outcomes for patients.
Rationale: As concept of PHP is extremely important in today’s context, it is helpful to integrate data related to pharmacist in population health management practices. Authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on role of pharmacist in population health management practices. Method: We conducted a systematic review of the literature on literature on role of pharmacist in population health management practices by searching, PubMed Medline database using the following combination of keywords – pharmacist, population health. Truncation was used to ensure retrieval of all possible variations of search terms. The search was limited to articles published between 1st January 2015 and 31st December 2019, human studies and English language.
Results: Initial search resulted in a total of 281 studies, title abstract review to remove irrelevant studies resulted in 256 studies. Yearly trend showed that number of publications are decreasing. Highest number of publications were from Europe (47; 18%) and 29 publications (11%) discussed role of pharmacist in population health management of subjects in the age group of 10 to 20 years. Twenty five publications mentioned health management was done in the community settings. Advice on the lifestyle was mentioned in 242 (96%) and 10 (4%) publications offered advice about drugs during the health management. Pharmacists played important roles in population health management for e.g. as care provider in exploring the challenges faced in clinics for management of Type 2 DM. Pharmacists played an important role in increasing the quality of life of patients.
Discussion: Population health management concept has evolved steadily over the past few decades and is now contributing to the ‘patient care journey’ at all stages. There were 24 (9%) publications from India. Specially designed and implemented Pharm D program would play a major role in Indian health care system in future. This will give an opportunity to pharmacists to work more prominently in Indian health care system.
Conclusion: Authors are of the opinion that this is the first review encompassing the topic of pharmacist and population health management in the global context. It is clear that there is a global trend of moving towards involvement of pharmacist in healthcare management. This enables pharmacists to assume an expanded role and at same time it necessitates reforms in pharmacy education and practice.