Analysis of the Use of Pharmacy Graduates in TaskShifting as an Alternative Management Strategy in Healthcare Organizations

The shortage of health care professionals and large patient load in developing countries like India, leads to large burden in healthcare system, resulting in impediment to optimum patient care. This leads to degradation in healthcare service quality. Based on our analysis, the data collected from 532 subjects reveals that only 7.01% of the subjects have received counselling always, 59.65% thinks counselling should be given and only 41.66% are satisfied with current healthcare system. This concludes that there is a scarcity of optimum patient care in the country for many chronic diseases. Hence a quick optimum solution is needed to address the critical shortage of trained healthcare professionals and it is found that Task shifting is an optimum alternate solution to address such acute shortage of professionally qualified healthcare workers in developing countries. In Task-shifting model, task acceptors should be a paramedical or pharmacy professional who can be trained quickly to treat the patients. In India, Pharmacists being ignored professions in healthcare system have crucial role to play between the prescriber and the patients. Pharmacy graduates could be used as medicine prescribers as in other developed countries as addition rather than substitution. This paper contains the analysis of the advantages, benefits, constraints, and disadvantages of the use of pharmacy graduates for task-shifting by healthcare organizations as alternative survival strategy. Factors influencing the various determinant issues of task shifting according to identified key attributes under four constructs are derived and the critical constituent elements (CCE) of these factors are listed and analysed.