Strengthening Hospital Pharmacy Practice in Nepal Through the Minimum Service Standards Checklist

Along with the positive development in health services and facilities, hospital pharmacy practice in Nepal has also evolved. The minimum service standards (MSS) developed by the Ministry of Health and Population of Nepal act as a structured framework to assess hospitals' readiness and capacity to deliver quality health services and consist of three significant domains: governance and management standards, clinical service management standards, and support service standards. The clinical service management standards also consist of the hospital pharmacy service standards of practice checklist. This study presents a perspective review of MSS checklists and their implications for pharmacy services, where we discuss how the MSS checklist acts as a viable tool for strengthening the hospital pharmacy practice in Nepal's primary, secondary, and tertiary hospitals. Following the MSS checklist, hospital administration, hospital leaders, hospital management committee, and the hospital pharmacy and therapeutic committee can help to develop further action plans to mitigate issues, thus resulting in 100% compliance with the checklist and quality improvement. This paper can also serve as evidence or a start-up for conducting MSS-based research at the provincial and federal levels to inform hospital pharmacy-based practices among the policy-related institutions in the coming days.