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

Nabin Pathak,1,2 Sachita Barma,2 Prabhat Kumar Jha,2 Prerana Shrestha,1 Ujjwal Yadav,3 Aman Kumar Sah,4 Shreya Dhungana,5 Sunil Shrestha6 1Drug Information Unit and Pharmacovigilance Cell, Department of Pharmacy, Hetauda Hospital, Madan Bhandari Academy of Health Sciences, Hetauda, Makwanpur, Nepal; 2Department of Pharmacy, Madan Bhandari Academy of Health Sciences, Hetauda, Makwanpur, Nepal; 3Province Health Logistic Management Center, Ministry of Health and Population, Janakpur, Madesh Province, Nepal; 4Department of Pharmacy, Madesh Institute of Health Sciences, Janakpur, Nepal; 5Department of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, College of Pharmacy, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA; 6Department of Research and Academics, Kathmandu Cancer Center, Bhaktapur, NepalCorrespondence: Nabin Pathak, Email [email protected]: 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.Keywords: hospital pharmacy, minimum service standards, pharmacy, pharmaceutical policy, Nepal