Welcome to this weeks edition of i2P dated 10 November 2014.
The year is fast drawing to a close but I think many pharmacists may have shortened their plans for an extended vacation this year. Instead, they will prefer to use the period between Christmas and the end of January as a reflective period to decide on the way forward.
New Years’ resolutions if you like.
As a contribution to this process i2P has prepared a reference article on the pricing of clinical services (and products) illustrating why pharmacists have not had much insight in the marketing of their principal product of patient advice.
Apart from the destructive political in-fighting between different levels of pharmacists it is the lack of understanding of the pharmacy market that mainly holds community pharmacy back in developing part of its core business of free advice to that of paid clinical services.
Mark Coleman also has an interesting insight into pharmacy shop windows and how they may currently aid the promotion of clinical services as an effective marketing aid.
Also, while the AMA attacks pharmacy for infringing on its turf, read how a couple of nurse practitioners have struck into the heartland of “pharmacy turf”.
How do pharmacists propose to handle this new form of competition from the nursing profession?
Barry Urquhart is back with us with a discourse on the current state of marketing in Australian business. His take is similar to that of i2P in that now is not the right time to cut back on marketing budgets and pharmacist hours.
The exact opposite is required – a determination to rebuild pharmacy in a new business model and to concentrate on the Ten Year Fight to bring paid clinical services to maturity.
Those who don’t will not have the capacity to differentiate their business, nor to differentiate services and products within that business.
Losing market control means losing profitability and eventually extinction.
Peter Sayers also alerts us to the fact that innovation and knowledge products involving original pharmacist research should be rewarded by government and industry.
What he is saying is that a new source of pharmacy revenue and employment can be built around the innovation that could pour from a renewed community pharmacy resurgence. It would almost be self generating and sustainable.
It is interesting that the medical profession is already up and running with a similar scheme, with lessons to be learned by pharmacists.
The Australian Pharmacy Council have published the accreditation standards for pharmacist vaccination training, basically leaving it to credible basic educators within the profession. Check out their media release.
Mark Neuenschwander reminisces about the development of the bar code in the US hospital setting and how it evolved from a health worker being sold a packet of chewing gum with one of the first developed product bar codes.
It was a single innovation that spawned a whole raft of safety systems to the benefit of hospital safety.
And to finish up our offering we carry the latest media releases from the PSA and NPS and don’t forget to attend the ASMI conference on the 18th November (see their website for details). They will be delivering material vital for community pharmacy renewal.
Enjoy your weekly read.
The Editor
10 November 2014