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Encouragement Unleashes Potential
Thomas Edison’s teacher said he was a poor student. His mother was furious at that characterization and took him out of school and taught him at home. Edison gave this account of the incident in an interview published on Nov. 29, 1907: “One day I overheard the teacher tell the inspector that I was ‘addled’ and it…
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Social Justice Programs – An Opportunity for a Patient Engagement and Health Literacy Expansion
Now that Location Rules have been made more certain through enabling legislation, it provides a level of certainty in respect of investing in services which would provide a community benefit, that in turn, could eventually be funded through government along the already familiar experience of a public/private partnership. i2P has previously expressed the opinion that…
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Confusion reigns
Because of the rather appalling protection given by the 2017 vaccination campaign, I wonder where we will go with the 2018 version. There’s certainly mixed messages about the relative effectiveness we can expect. Interestingly, I posed this question on social media a few days ago. What might we expect? Will you get vaccinated? The responses…
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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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A New Year Brings Change
A new year often brings new beginnings. I was intrigued to discover how one company used a novel way to motivate employees to think about new ways of doing things. Here is the approach practiced by Chiyoji Misawa, who founded the largest home builder in Japan, Misawa Homes, more than 50 years ago. He “died”…
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Please give me eye contact!
It what seems obvious findings, patients prefer their doctors to be engaging in conversation, and to ignore any online screens. As electronic medical records become more common, it’s not unusual for doctors to enter data into a computer as they talk with their patients. Doctors seeing patients for the first time, when trying to build…
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I’VE BEEN THINKING about my first lecture on pharmacy automation, the life work of Dr. Kenneth N. Barker, and the autographed baseball I keep on my desk.
On August 23, 2017, I received word that hospital-pharmacy icon and dear friend, Kenneth N. Barker, passed away earlier that morning. Below is a blog I wrote upon his retirement in 2009. I have made a few edits to bring it up to date. I’ve been thinking about my first lecture on pharmacy-automation, the life work…
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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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Are we obsessed with numbers and forget who our patients are?
We live in a world where patience is a diminishing commodity. We want each day to wrap up like an episode of a TV show. We want to end all arguments by having the perfectly worded Facebook post. We want to work out the solutions to our problems, meet our soul-mate, elect the perfect candidate,…
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Mentoring Works Both Ways
Anyone who doesn’t understand the value of one minute hasn’t been paying attention to my good friend Ken Blanchard. Starting with his “One Minute Manager” and moving through a series of bestsellers, he has shown his millions of fans how just sixty seconds can improve your chances for success. Good news – he’s at it…