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Leadership – How it Fails
In the past, Australian Pharmacy leadership has been characterised by a single word – “reprisal”. This is what you learned to expect if you dared to openly challenge a pharmacy leader. As you might imagine, i2P has survived a number of “reprisal” attacks that eventuated simply because i2P said what it genuinely thought. We have survived…
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Future Pharmacy Starting From a Compound Base
Pharmaca is a US-based integrative pharmacy company that has developed a pharmacy model which could be adapted to an Australian “future pharmacy” model. Basically, it is a compounding pharmacy first, with outreach into evidence-based complementary medicine (hence they are integrative medicine specialists) plus a retail segment. By US standards it is a small to medium…
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Failure isn’t fatal
In 1860 a thirty-eight-year old man was working as a handyman for his father, a leather merchant. He kept books, drove wagons and handled hides for about $66 a month. Prior to this menial job the man had failed as a soldier, a farmer and a real estate agent. Most of the people who knew…
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Patient Engagement is Patient Management and Customer Conversion
How often do you openly engage with a patient, particularly when you have a busy dispensing schedule under way and the order in your day is rapidly becoming “disorder”. Eyes averted, you bend your head to avoid eye contact, because that would extend patient engagement, and with that, your day suddenly just deteriorated a shade…
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Health Station Central – Rebuilding Trust
The community pharmacy environment is really the public face of pharmacy and has been privileged by being protected by legislation. There is an obligation to do the job properly and utilise the space to accommodate highly trained staff to deliver a complete service. There is also an expectation that skilled staff will be paid appropriately…
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Extreme? Not Necessarily
First, think of the consequences. “Extreme discounts” do attract widespread attention, can generate increased sales and revenue in the short-term and therefore, for specific time-periods, have the capacity to redirect traffic flows. But the tactic is fraught with potential intermediate-to-long-term brand damage consequences. Questions about profit margins and value are understandably raised in the minds…
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Pharmacy by Design – Reinventing the Dispensary
Recently, we published some work (Pharmacy by Design) carried out by some US design researchers that involved pharmacy design basic research. The company, which is called Nurture by Steelcase, conducted research over a number of differing pharmacy settings and came up with a number of principles that held true for a pharmacy in all those…
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Life is what you make it
One of my favorite “Peanuts” cartoons by Charles Schultz has Charlie Brown saying, “I learned something in school today. I signed up for folk guitar, computer programming, stained glass, art, shoemaking, and a natural foods workshop.” “Instead,” he said, “I got spelling, history, arithmetic, and two study periods.” The last panel has Charlie’s companion asking,…
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Costco to stir the pot in 2015
US retailing giant Costco plans to inject yet more capital into its Australian business as it launches more stores and seeks to muscle in to the petrol station market. This will force the Australian duopoly of Coles and Woolworths to be more competitive. Costco’s revenue surged in 2014 as customers sought out goods ranging from…
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Pharmacists Have the Best Job in the World
The claim that is made by the title of this article refers to a study by a company called “CareerCast” who are a specialist employment agency in the US medical field. For the first time that I can remember they are featuring pharmacists as being in the “must have” job. But they lost my vote…