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Is Health a Team Game Anymore?
Interesting statement from the outgoing AMA president where he says that “if we go farming off little elements of health care to pharmacy and other health professionals, we lose out”. I interpret that as simply “we doctors make less money” but in my view, the patient benefits wonderfully in most instances. The recent exchanges on […]
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Can I complain?
Ever been subjected to a formal complaint? Ever had one of those notices from AHPRA setting out the details of a complaint, allowing you a few weeks to respond, and then to sweat for months waiting for an outcome? There has to be system I agree, whereby a legitimate error has occurred, whereby a patient […]
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An Opportunity Opens Up – Will Pharmacy Leaders Grab It?
As pharmacists and coalface health practitioners we accumulate a lot of knowledge that other health practitioners do not have access to. This is because we are the only health profession that does not require a payment from a patient to access our physical pharmacy space. In addition, pharmacy culture has always allowed pro bono professional […]
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Pro Bono Pharmacy Services Create a Social Dividend
Pharmacists have always embraced a culture where service provision for health problems have been provided free of charge to local communities, while the physical product that resulted as a solution to those health problems attracted a monetary value. In contrast, GP’s charged for their services (consultations) and basically avoided selling products. Given that pharmacists and […]
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Pharmacy Care- a Search for Competition?
It’s some time since I caught up with Seth Godin (the international marketing guru with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of words of wisdom and inspiration). One of his recent quotes caught my eye: “In search of competition- The busiest Indian restaurants in New York City are all within a block or two of each other. […]
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Scottish pharmacy – a public/private partnership that encourages pharmacist clinical development.
Scotland has long displayed a talent for identifying the care role for pharmacists and expanding that role by supporting clinical aspirations for pharmacists, and made central to their total National Health Service delivery. The HealthierScotlandStrategy document published in August 2017 and titled ‘Achieving Excellence in Pharmaceutical Care’ aims to “strengthen the role of pharmacy in both hospital and […]
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The Race to the Bottom
The McDonald’s Big Mac is an icon of take-away eating – let’s face it………..can you remember when you first enjoyed one so many years ago? It’s a guilty pleasure to say the least, but as far as hamburgers go, it is far from the best. In reality, if we were to taste an assortment of […]
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King & Complementary Medicines
I continue to be amazed at how the wide-reaching inquiry into the future of our profession has been hijacked into a focus on complementary medicines and more specifically homeopathy. This enquiry, having now published their findings as “options”, seems to have overlooked the wide-ranging expectations as to how pharmacists can be used more effectively to […]
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Blockchain – disruptive technology behind “cryptocurrencies” and now set to invade health.
A blockchain is defined as a distributed database that can maintain an ever-expanding list of records (called “blocks”) without the need for a trusted administrator or a central server, instead relying on a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. Each block contains a time stamp and a link to a […]
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Setting up an Open Innovation Program
Let’s face it – community pharmacy is in a knowledge transfer bind. It can no longer function under its own self reliance. It is bogged down because pharmacy leadership has developed hardening of the arteries and finds itself immobile inside each of its traditional infrastructures. The primary cause is twofold: * Information is being collated […]