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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 Practice of Self Care – Where it all Begins
The concept and practice of Self Care has been part of pharmacy core business for as long as I can remember. Because of the high costs of the delivery of health care, it is beginning to become more prominent in the minds of health policy planners because Self Care has implications for long-term health benefits…
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Pharmacists are primary in healthcare and its economics
One of the most successful marketing slogans ever developed by the Pharmacy Guild of Australia (PGA) was: “Ask your family chemist – he knows!” The public response to it was massive and just seemed to hit the right nerve. Its popularity eventually irritated the medical profession who couldn’t understand how a pharmacist might know more…
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Medical Culture (and others) in Decline – the real reason for attacks on pharmacy and other health modalities.
We have been witnessing some extraordinary behaviour by the leaders of the medical profession (AMA, RACGP) that might make you wonder what hallucinogen they may have been taking, given the extreme claims of pharmacy creating a turf war, and their ridiculous claims of highly-trained pharmacists lacking skills to perform at different levels. They act panic-stricken…
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Australia is Number Two in Global Health Rankings – But for How Long?
Periodically, the US-based Commonwealth Fund organisation compares the US health system to that of other countries, including Australia. The Australian health system ranks very high in its performance and i2P believes there are two major reasons for this outside of the criteria established by the Commonwealth Fund. The first is the diversity of health practitioners…
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Pathology Services – Better Options for Community Pharmacy
The recent pressure applied by the AMA and the RACGP in respect of the Sigma / Sonic Healthcare Project, to offer paid pathology tests through the AMCAL franchise must be bordering on unacceptable conduct under the Australian Trade Practices Act. The medical profession is looking and acting more like a cartel in every respect and…
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Amazon May Force Australian Pharmacy Culture Change – at last!
Although the pharmacy profession in Australia has the ability to change its culture it has generally relied on external forces to create the necessary impulse and reaction. Traditionally, the force has originated from government, the medical profession, government and medical combined, Big Box Retail and more recently, mainstream media combination generally promoting a global pharma…
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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…
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Location Rules Need to be Re-purposed
For the best part of 12 months it has been an open secret that Location Rules for pharmacies would pass muster as being of sufficient “public benefit” for them to remain in place. Even the chair of the King Review very early in his investigation, appeared to favour retention of the rules. For those of…