Community Pharmacy or Commodity Pharmacy?
Each model of pharmacy that has emerged over the past five years has been a variation of the traditional community pharmacy version. While pharmacy positions itself as providing supply chain services and competes with supermarkets, it is little wonder that bureaucrats see us as only providing products that can be easily compared for price. Discount pharmacies commoditise everything to keep prices low and commonly pharmacist supervision is missing in the service activity. You pay for what you get but all other models of pharmacy need to communicate better what they do, and add more services content that patients need.
Gerald Quigley - An advocate for Integrative Medicine
Are pharmacies becoming a glamorised outlet for widely advertised complementary and over-the-counter medicines that require no skill to “pack and wrap”?
Sales based on an advertisement in weekend papers (all heavily discounted of course!) and sales of nutritionals into China are driving our professionalism underground.
Pharmacists who have never entertained supporting a particular complementary medicine are now demanding thousands of packs based on an enquiry from one of their customers. Do they believe that there will be a favourable patient outcome?
Or are they in it for the quick buck?
Patients are being denied access to the latest complementary medicines backed by superb research because pharmacists and pharmacy businesses are being coerced by category managers within buying groups to go with the mass advertised option instead of a solution which address the particular health issue at hand.
It’s no wonder that patients are buying online, because they are able to actually use what that want to use, and won’t be sold a different option instead.
It’s no wonder that pharmacists who want to differentiate themselves and drive their own name and reputation are finding financial and professional satisfaction.
And it’s no wonder that health food outlets are starting to win back patients who drifted into their local pharmacy instead.
Those health food outlets are often contained within a supermarket chain.
As I have said so often……every patient is different, they require our care and guidance, and they live down the road, not in China.
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