Published on: 2026-11-10
Source: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia – Российский университет дружбы народов –
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What is the difference between a pharmacist and a pharmaceutical chemist? How is pharmacy changing under the influence of modern technologies? What opportunities are opening up for pharmaceutical chemists? Why is pharmaceutical literacy important for patient safety? And what is the modern model of patient care provided by the pharmacist? These questions were answered by Lyudmila Trubnikova, Candidate of Pharmaceutical Sciences, assistant professor at the Department of Pharmacy Management and Economics of the RUDN Medical Institute, during a lecture within the framework of the scientific and educational project “Seekers of Science.”
“Seekers of Science” is a scientific and educational project by the MIK Foundation (Moscow Innovation Cluster), the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH), and the company Innopraktika, supported by VK. The project is aimed at to support young Russian scientists and popularize scientific knowledge.
Security issues
Pharmaceutical literacy among the population still remains at a low level, she noted in the lecture “Pharmacist of the 21st Century: Science, Technology, and Care for People” Lyudmila Trubnikova.
“Patients often do not distinguish between the international nonproprietary name (INN) and the brand name, do not follow medication instructions, such as ‘before meals’ or ‘after meals.’ They take medications with inappropriate drinks, split tablets that should not be split. Moreover, it is common for medications to be taken on the advice of acquaintances or after appealing advertisements. Each such an error may reduce therapy effectiveness or harm health,” she warned.
Therefore, pharmaceutical information is a matter of safety, not just “reference data,” emphasized the expert.
What a pharmacist should know
People do not always know the difference between a pharmacist and a pharmaceutical technician.
“A pharmacist is a specialist with higher pharmaceutical education, who studies for 5 years, while a pharmacist is a person with secondary vocational education. The main stereotype is that the druggist works only at the “first counter” in the pharmacy. In reality, they are presented with the amazing pharmaceutical world: laboratories, analytics, management, marketing, and much more,” she said Lyudmila Trubnikova.
She reminded that management and economics of pharmacy (UFE) is a comprehensive applied discipline that has been taught for over 60 years within the higher pharmaceutical education system and unites the organization of pharmaceutical activities, economics, accounting, management, and marketing.
“The feature of UEF is its dynamism. The content of the discipline is constantly changing under the influence of the external environment: political, economic, social. It is the UEF that addresses the tasks related to the management of entities involved in the circulation of medicinal products in a changing market and digitalization,” she said expert.
Patient-centered care
Separately Lyudmila Trubnikova talked about personalized pharmaceutical care for children.
“The child’s body has its own physiological characteristics. Domestic and foreign studies show that pharmaceutical care for children is influenced by various factors. On the one hand, there are objective problems in the drug market: difficulties in pharmaceutical development of drugs for children, a limited range of pediatric medicines, the absence of dosage forms suitable for use in children of different ages. As a result, there is prescribing of drugs off-label,” she reminded.
On the other hand, when providing assistance to children, there are features of the external environment caused by digital transformations. They change not only the channels of communication between medical and pharmaceutical specialists and patients, but also the principles of interaction with consumers. And today, increasing attention is being paid to human-centered technologies, which take into account the individual and physiological characteristics of a child’s body, as well as encourage parents to become involved in the process of treating the child and preventing diseases.
“The combination of these factors determines the need for a modern model patient-centered pharmaceutical care. It is built on the principles of “4P medicine”: personalization, prediction, prevention, and participation (patient involvement). This, in particular, is a personalized approach, and our research is dedicated to developing it,” she noted Lyudmila Trubnikova.
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