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Pharmacy Equivalent of a Patient Centred Home
A patient-centred home does not properly exist in most pharmacies because pharmacists have been building business models that relied on ever expanding retail sales. In the process, “patient homes” were eliminated. Older style pharmacies did not rely on enclosed rooms. They simply relied on counters and quiet corners to have a chat in. Because older…
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Pharmacists may be intellectually bankrupt today – financially bankrupt tomorrow
Pharmacists collectively deserve the derogatory comments proffered regularly by the AMA about providing professional services between the “toilet paper and the toothpaste”. Not enough has been done by pharmacy leadership organisations or individual pharmacy proprietors in terms of investment in appropriate clinical spaces. Nothing in terms of spatial identity and patient comfort has evolved anywhere…
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Functional Medicine – Embracing All That Is Needed in Health
Functional Medicine is a system that addresses the underlying causes of disease, using a systems-oriented approach and engaging both patient and practitioner in a therapeutic partnership. It talks about cures rather than just management and embraces all that is evidence-based in integrative medicine and other complementary medicine modalities. It is an evolution in health practice…
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Nutrition issues – another opportunity
Deakin University has come to the conclusion that most doctors are ill-equipped to identify and manage the nutritional needs of patients. Listening to my patients tell me that their GPs never allows them to eat eggs, because of the effects on their cholesterol, supports that Deakin conclusion. Deakin found for example, that a mere 15%…
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I’ve been thinking about Tina, Sarah, slinkies, and how improv may improve your group’s productivity.
I’ve been thinking about Tina, Sarah, slinkies, and how improv may improve your group’s productivity. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I thought Tina Fey did a good Sarah Palin—so good that when the governor from Alaska joined the comedian on Saturday Night Live, it seemed as if Tina Palin and Sarah Fey were impersonating each…
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Pricing- Get it Right While Marketing in the Right Direction
This article is intended as a reference article for the marketing of professional services to assist all pharmacists (owners and individual practitioners) to succeed in a new paradigm of pharmacy with its traditional core business of dispensing plus free advice, with the advice component being developed to paid professional services (core expansion). Pharmacists are highly…
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The Humble Shop Window Display – Maybe a Much Needed Ingredient?
The current physical presentation for a pharmacy does not generally include a specific area that was a future of the recent past, namely a shop window. Giving ground to the view that retail space is costly and every square metre needs to be allocated to consumer accessible displays, we have seen shop windows disappear and…
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Marketing Focus: Execute or be Executed
Times are tough. It’s enough to contemplate giving up… or simply to cut back. However, before doing so consider for a moment the following philosophy: “A man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops a clock to save time.” Now is not the time to be driven to save money…
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I’ve been thinking about presidents, engineers, nurses, and the law of unintended consequences
The bulk of the word consequence is sequence. In sequence, outcomes (intended or not) follow actions. Typically, consequences is used in reference to negative outcomes. In 1974, Richard Nixon had neither intended nor anticipated the devastating sequence of events that would follow the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up. He had not expected his actions would…
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“Ask Your Pharmacist” – the New and Not so New PGA Initiative
The landscape of pharmacy, until very recent times, has lacked affirmation and direction. The latest television advertisement developed by the PGA exhorts the general public to “ask more” about what their pharmacy provides, and then has the walls of the pharmacy open out in the form of a cross, each arm of the cross suggesting…