The Health care industry is ever growing
and full of new innovations and research. Everyday some new drug or medical
processes are devised to make our lives better. With these thousands of drugs
and studies bombarding the masses the role of pharmacist and, drugs information
agencies are increasing ever more. This field of profession requires more
skills and information retrieval processes to cope up with the ever increasing
demand from the healthcare sector. One of the competencies that present medical
professional of pharmacists must achieve is the capability to “retrieve,
analyze, and understand the scientific data which offers drugs information and
guidance to patients, their families or care givers, and other companies
engaged in this profession. In short the medical and pharmaceutical industry
needs to take the responsibility of effective drugs information suppliers.
SCOPE
OF DRUG INFORMATION RESOURCES
With the development of new drugs and the
advancement of treatments, it has become very difficult for pharmacists and
medical representatives and other physicians to keep abreast with all these
changes. Furthermore, with lots of information available through media and
internet patients are continually becoming more engaged in retrieving information
independently. Many patients prefer to direct their health-related concerns to their
pharmacists because these people are accessible to the public. Although these
pharmacists may not always have the response to every query, they should know
how to locate this information.
The typical way in which a pharmacologist
has to deal with this situation is by answering questions such as relevant doses
and administration of a drug, drugs information, pharmacotherapy, and illness
management, such as the use of over the counter drugs and nutritional
supplements. In the response to such queries and giving appropriate
recommendations, there is an assortment of drugs web resources to choose from.
Knowing the most appropriate resource to use in each situation and how to
effectively use those resources will increase the likelihood of answering each
particular query completely and effectively.
In order to retrieve the drug information resources effectively, these resources are categorized into three categories called
Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. We will discuss more about the Tertiary drug
information sources which form an integral part of this information retrieval.
TERTIARY
DRUG INFORMATION SOURCES
Tertiary drugs resources, try to analyse
and decipher main drug information literature and form the most typical types
of resources that the pharmacologist will utilize Tertiary resources may
consist of books, assessment articles, and other common information, such as
information mined on the Internet.
Tertiary resources have their own benefits and
disadvantages. Some benefits consist of convenience of use, accuracy and
reliability; however, limitations with Tertiary resources consist of unpredictable
delay time associated with publication, which may be as long as one to two years.
It is possible that some of the facts may be outdated, particularly if new
recommendations or new content has been released after such long duration of
publication of the referrals. Another consideration is that the facts offered
may be imperfect due to space restrictions or because of imperfect research
work done by the authors of the content. Important features of tertiary
resources that one should consider when using these resources are the skills of
the writer, purpose of it, version and year of publication, resources cited,
convenience of use, and structure in which the facts is being obtained.
As a conclusion we can say that out of
numerous drug information resources found in different areas the pharmacist and
medical representatives should be careful to choose judiciously the optimum
information which will benefit the patients and medical professionals.
