Developing Collaborative Working Relationships Between Pharmacists and Physicians

The need to improve patient care by coordinating the activities of various health care providers has become a topic of increasing interest in the health care community.1–6 Practitioners from each discipline can use their specialized training and skills to make significant contributions to patient care. Pharmacists, for example, can provide the team with expertise needed to improve a patient’s drug therapy and self-care skills. However, to optimize this contribution, they need to learn to work in a collaborative manner as members of an interdisciplinary team. Over the past few years, pharmacists have begun entering into collaborative practice agreements (CPAs) as a way to integrate their services with those of physicians.7 Although CPAs are important to the successful integration of pharmacists’ and physicians’ practices, signing a CPA represents a late stage in these practitioners’ working relationship—a stage most pharmacists have not yet reached. Although more than half of the 50 states have some statute or regulation addressing collaborative drug therapy management, few pharmacists are actually engaged in these collaborations. Before pharmacists can attain the level in which a CPA is possible, they must form successful working relationships with physicians. In this article we describe a model of the stages of building collaborative working relationships (CWRs), provide pharmacists with suggestions to reach each stage, and illustrate the model with an example of a CWR among pharmacists and physicians in a community setting. Benefits of Improved Collaboration