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Courage is an everyday virtue
Students in a philosophy class were anxiously awaiting the start of their final exam. The professor had warned them that it would be one of the most challenging tests they would ever take. The teacher wrote one question on the board and said, “This is your exam. You have one hour to complete it.” One…
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Patient Engagement – Start With The Salutation
Health is a very personal business and trust is a very important element in the “engagement” mix as far as delivering information about conditions or medications, and the mentoring required when transferring knowledge and understanding. Engagement is a two-way process and involves system and style. For example, I have often used my knowledge of family…
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Define Your Pharmacy Frustum
I was performing my regular reading of my emails when I came across the latest words of wisdom from Seth Godin. Seth always seems to read my mind, and his emails often cross over with a period of time when I may be thinking about a pharmacy problem, but finding difficulty in trying to express…
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Pharmacy has lost its chemistry
The pharmacy profession has lost its chemistry, it has become pharmacy against pharmacy until the cheaper more aggressive one triumphs against the other. The consequences of losing our chemistry is that we are no longer afraid of destroying the lives of the pharmacy next door, because they are looked at as a business and business must…
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The Formal Documents Required for a Functioning Pharmacy Business
Many pharmacy businesses (even some of the larger variety) often do not conduct important aspects of their business by having basic contracts/agreements in place for each activity. You do not have to be a legal expert, when often all that is required is an exchange of letters confirming details of your mutual discussion and your understanding…
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MedsASSIST May Prove To Be A Useful Long Term Monitoring Tool
The MedsASSIST system, designed to monitor pharmacy sales of codeine products, has reached the stage of progressing to stage two of a pilot, involving approximately 150 pharmacies in the Newcastle and North Queensland regions. The system is being introduced because government was intending to reschedule codeine to schedule 4 (prescription only) status. Addiction to prescription…
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Seth Godin Clarity – as applied to pharmacy
I have long been admired the mental agility of Seth Godin, the US marketing guru who was the author of an Internet transforming book titled “The Ideavirus”. Basically, he identified and predicted what has now come to pass, in that “word of mouth” would be displaced by “word of mouse”. His words reported further along…
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Break your own rules
My friend Sam is an avid golfer. He plays every chance he gets. He also makes a practice of working out at the gym on weekends, and prefers to get an early start there. One Saturday, the forecast called for a warm and sunny morning with heavy rain developing by noon. Still, Sam kept to…
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You can’t win if your head is not in the game
The late Yogi Berra was playing in the minor leagues for the Newark Bears before joining the New York Yankees for his Hall-of-Fame career. His manager told him not to swing at balls out of the strike zone. The manager said, “Yogi, next time you’re up, think about what you’re doing.” Yogi said, “I struck…
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Taking the Initiative with Co-Pay
Chemist Warehouse, as you would have imagined, has taken the initiative to discount the co-pay for PBS prescriptions by $1.00. The impact on a retail pharmacy like the warehouse model is not quite the same as for a community pharmacy, because budgets for retail pharmacies are geared for lower profit percentages combined with higher turnover…