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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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Pharmacy Care- a Search for Competition?
It’s some time since I caught up with Seth Godin (the international marketing guru with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of words of wisdom and inspiration). One of his recent quotes caught my eye: “In search of competition- The busiest Indian restaurants in New York City are all within a block or two of each other.…
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I’VE BEEN THINKING about my first lecture on pharmacy automation, the life work of Dr. Kenneth N. Barker, and the autographed baseball I keep on my desk.
On August 23, 2017, I received word that hospital-pharmacy icon and dear friend, Kenneth N. Barker, passed away earlier that morning. Below is a blog I wrote upon his retirement in 2009. I have made a few edits to bring it up to date. I’ve been thinking about my first lecture on pharmacy-automation, the life work…
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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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Stop procrastinating before it stops you
A third grader had to do a book report, and he chose a Socrates biography. His report consisted of three succinct sentences: Socrates was a philosopher. He talked a lot. They killed him. Not much more to say about brevity. Maybe that’s why U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Be sincere. Be brief. Be seated.” Another U.S. President,…
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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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A Glimpse of the Future – The King Review Interim Report Nightmare
That the King Review is a front for something more sinister would be obvious to most pharmacists and the industry at large. That it purports to be a review towards a positive future for community pharmacy is an insult to anyone’s intelligence. i2P has already made the case for what the real agenda for Australian…
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King & Complementary Medicines
I continue to be amazed at how the wide-reaching inquiry into the future of our profession has been hijacked into a focus on complementary medicines and more specifically homeopathy. This enquiry, having now published their findings as “options”, seems to have overlooked the wide-ranging expectations as to how pharmacists can be used more effectively to…
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Has Professional Pharmacy descended to a new low?
The Pharmaceutical Society has come out of hiding and expressed again their ongoing concerns about the quality and control of complementary medicines in Australia. They have a crack at the TGA once again, and imply that pharmacists are unprofessional if they support the sale of these products in a pharmacy setting. If they have the…