A pharmacist-centered view of how clinical care is expanding beyond dispensing, where workload and information gaps constrain action, and what needs to change next.
Audience: Pharmacists
Countries: 6
Completion Rate: 77.4%
SGID: 8978519
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– Quick Read — Key Findings
Pharmacists are taking on more medication review, counseling, vaccination, screening, chronic disease support, and referral decisions beyond traditional dispensing.
45.7% say the role in direct patient care has expanded significantly over the past three years, while 38.0% report moderate expansion. The role is moving forward even as workload, reimbursement, fragmented information, and uneven collaboration continue to shape delivery.
WHO/Europe and FIP describe the same broader shift toward pharmaceutical care, chronic disease support, vaccination, and digitally enabled services, alongside the need for workforce and system capacity.
The survey therefore frames role expansion as a delivery challenge: clinical expectations are growing faster than the systems that support them.
Significant and moderate expansion dominate responses, while only a small minority say the role has become more limited. 45.7% report significant expansion, 38.0% moderate expansion, 14.7% little change, and 1.6% a more limited role.
The insight is operational: as clinical responsibility grows, assessment, counseling, documentation, and coordination add work that a dispensing-led workflow may not fully absorb. In practical terms, the role is changing for most respondents, but the surrounding model still has to accommodate the additional clinical work.
Pharmacist patient care now spans medication optimization, vaccination, screening, chronic disease support, prevention, and education. 79.8% provide medication review, optimization, or adherence counseling; 68.2% provide vaccination, screening, or point-of-care testing; 51.9% report chronic disease or minor-ailment care; and 50.4% provide preventive care, education, or medication safety services.
Time allocation shows this is not a marginal activity for everyone: 34.4% spend more than half of their working time on direct clinical care, while 35.2% spend 10-25%. The spread across service types also suggests that pharmacists may need different staffing, documentation, and coordination support depending on the clinical mix they provide.
Patient need comes first, but what happens next depends on the pharmacist’s authority, information access, confidence, time, and referral pathways. 82.7% select clinical severity and immediate needs, 63.8% scope of practice and available interventions, 48.8% access to patient information and clinical support, and 44.9% confidence, time, and referral pathways.
The chart shows a two-step decision: pharmacists identify the clinical need first, then the system determines how much of that need can be managed directly. That gap between recognizing a problem and being able to resolve it directly is where scope, records, time, and referral infrastructure become decisive.
Protected time is the clearest constraint, and incomplete patient information adds a second layer of friction. 78.6% select workload, staffing, or limited consultation time; 54.8% scope or reimbursement limits; and 39.7% each select information, training, or technology gaps and limited collaboration or organizational support.
Only 27.8% report full access to relevant clinical information. 35.7% have most information, 27.8% partial or fragmented access, and 8.7% very limited or no meaningful access. The combination of workload pressure and incomplete information helps explain why greater clinical responsibility can remain difficult even when pharmacists have the capability to provide it.
Future growth points to an operating-model redesign, not simply more clinical expectations. Medication optimization and chronic disease management leads expected service expansion at 35.2%, followed by vaccination, screening, and preventive health at 24.0%, minor-ailment and point-of-care care at 20.8%, and digital, remote, or collaborative care at 20.0%.
Open responses reinforce the same direction: easier access to records, more consultation time and staffing, better reimbursement, broader autonomy, stronger physician collaboration, and clearer recognition of pharmacists as care providers. The direction is consistent across the quantitative and open-ended responses: sustainable expansion needs a stronger operating model around the pharmacist.
The survey shows pharmacists already contributing across medication review, vaccination, screening, chronic disease support, prevention, and referral decisions.
What limits the role sits around it: workload, incomplete information, scope, reimbursement, and uneven integration with the wider care team. Expanding pharmacist-led care will depend on redesigning those conditions, not simply adding more expectations.
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