globally, it's your responsibility to maintain an intact Python environment for the scripts that rely on it (#! /usr/bin/env python), especially the ones that are vital for the operation of your OS, such as yum.
It's sad to say that python runs into the same problem that other dominant programming language went through: dependencies hell...
That has been said, python programmers prefer the approach called sandbox, which is the localized python environment that is spawned from a Python base installation.
There are tools out there to serve this purpose, the most popular one is virtualenv. Starting from Python 3, it's built-in venv.
As for virtualenv, you can install it through pip, and there are other utilities, such as virtualenvwrapper,virtualenv-burrito, which were built on top of virtualenv and offer finer control on the behaviors of the virtual environment and the bootstrap of your python scripts. The best practice seems to be having a python virtual environment for each python application to avoid any collision or compatibility issues among modules.
Regarding to the concern you have on module import, please be more specific...