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Health Literacy – A Concept for a Valid Direction for Community Pharmacy
Recently, I had a conversation with a health professional involved in the public health system. Research had emerged that large pockets of populations were experiencing epidemic levels of chronic illness such as obesity, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. These population pockets correlated with areas of low socio-economic households where people had generally poor diets and…
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Guardrails – Why they Need Continual Analysis and exist with a Balanced Direction
Guardrails “A large, freshly-paved parking lot has no boundaries. You can drive in any direction, free to speed to your destination. But once there’s more than a few cars driving, traffic stops. It’s too risky, there are too many uncertainties. A car could come at you from any direction, and so we crawl. Flow is…
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The Amazon Supermarket (and Pharmacy) Coming to a Place Near to You
Just before Christmas 2016 i2P alerted pharmacists to a global retailer (Amazon) making plans to enter the Australian market with a massive retail offering (see http://i2p.com.au/how-amazon-will-dominate-global-retail/ ) and ambitions to dominate the entire retail sector. Amazon, of course, is already known in Australia for its online retailing of books While it often seems that some…
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Design for a Medication Safety Plan
The problem of creating a quality professional pharmacy practice for community pharmacy is often in conflict with the metrics required to provide a solid business infrastructure. Without a sound infrastructure there is no support to underpin a professional practice, so Codes of Conduct and minimum levels for Standards of Practice have to be developed. Increased…
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Patient impressions
Do we really understand how your patients perceive us? Experts agree that our patients form an opinion of our practice in a matter of seconds. And some of the latest research on first impressions suggest that it might be within the blink of an eye. I’m not referring to the pharmacy building here….I’m referring to…
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Onboarding – a Key Word to Learn for Your Future Profitability
In planning resources for a pharmacy I often pose the question: “Which of the two resources of staff and patients is the most important, and what must be budgeted for first?” Seems a bit of a rhetorical question and if you answered “patients” both times you are technically wrong. If you do not have a…
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The Starting Points for Change – Education and Cultural Adjustment
Most people working in community pharmacies recognise that there is a need to change. But the change needed is so broad that the starting point remains hidden. What needs to be changed? How do we achieve change? And how do we go about it? The essential starting point is a progressive change in culture and…
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Marketing Focus – Essays on Management and Marketing Issues
INTRODUCTION Time could be against you. Business owners and managers who have addressed the consequences of GFC (Global Financial Crisis) and the mining sector downturn with cost cutting and operations refinements may contend that they are now well placed for an economic upturn. It could be a long wait. So many indeterminable variables are, and…
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For Future Growth & Stability – Add an Advisory Board
Pharmacy Practice requires a clearly defined infrastructure (physical and conceptual) before the product of a pharmacy practice can be delivered. Since the bottom of the last pharmacy business cycle in 2012 there has been a general realisation that pharmacy culture must change to a new paradigm and deliver a new end product – but a…
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Mean girls who impede the success of other women
Editor’s Note: My generation has long lived with the concept of the “glass ceiling” for women in senior management positions and as pharmacy owners. I have never personally felt that I was discriminatory against women in any workplace situation that I was involved with, but I guess that is really for others to judge. But…