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Wisdom is Sunlight Of the Soul
Quotes, aphorisms, proverbs or whatever you want to call them — I’m a junkie. I picked up the habit from my father who was an Associated Press journalist. Readers of my nationally syndicated column will recognize them as morals. They need to be short, snappy and to the point. A good moral or proverb must…
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Pharmacy in the Home (PIH) – Designing Your Future Direction
This is a project that has finally gained traction with community pharmacy leadership. As a reference exercise, i2P plans to condense its knowledge of PIH projects and deliver this content to readers, spread over a number of articles. The necessity of the project is self evident when you consider age demographics of the Australian population.…
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Countdown as Australian Pharmacy Begins the Transition as Part of a Global Network
In an i2P editorial dated May 29 2017, an analysis of the rift between Sigma and Chemist Warehouse was provided. Please take the time to revisit this analysis. While dialogue between the parties continued since that date, the inevitable has now happened and the rift has become a split. In the i2P analysis at that…
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An Evening With Manuel Cardoso – The Man Who Helped Reform Portugal’s Drug Policy
There was a big turn-out on rainy Sydney evening for drug law reform meeting. Tuesday 5th June 2018. St Stephen’s Church, Macquarie Street, Sydney, for “An evening with Manuel Cardoso – the man who helped reform Portugal’s drug policy”. The take-home message to get through to our politicians: decriminalisation is now proven to save lives, money…
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Professional Discretion Restored – Much More than Homeopathic Product Sales
The Australian Government has made a commonsense decision to allow pharmacists to continue the sale of homeopathic products for those patients who find they derive benefit from their use. The actual extract from the government response to the homeopathy issue in the final King Review Report states: “Recommendation 4-4: Sale of Homeopathic Products in PBS…
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Marketing Professional Services – Tactics & Strategies
Pharmacists are slowly coming to grips with the provision of professional services and are fleshing out suitable business models very cautiously. In part, this caution arises out of a sense of uncertainty because of the culture change that has to be embraced in converting what was previously an unstructured service (provided free of charge) to…
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Scotland’s Pharmacist Practitioner Champions
Perhaps it is because of my Scottish heritage, but I am continually dawn to the Scottish business model for community pharmacy, funded and developed in a genuine partnership between community pharmacists and government. One of its lesser publicised components is the funding of “Practitioner Champions”. It’s not a lot of money (£300,000 funding for this year),…
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Blockchain – a trust system that could underwrite health information exchanges and integrate with other trust systems.
Blockchain is a relatively new technology system that can be customised to transact trusted actions, not being under a centralised control involving governments or banks. It is closely associated with the concept of Bitcoin, which is described as a form of financial currency called “cryptocurrency”. Many new cryptocurrencies have been launched, most emulating Bitcoin’s success in…
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Pharmacy Disruptors – Amazon, Artificial Intelligence & Holographic Health Practitioners
Disruption, as we all know, is an inevitability that is to be feared. If that fear can be used to motivate a chain reaction of positivity, then we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Fear is already building around the knowledge that Amazon will be entering the pharmacy market in Australia and that…
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“Pushy” customers or are they merely “informed”?
I was rather puzzled when reading an article on the challenges of a “pushy” customer and the pressures placed on student pharmacists. I’m puzzled because we, in pharmacy, have lost the skills of listening. We have become so “medicalised” that we now seem to “tell” rather than “partner in a satisfactory outcome”. Whether the educators…