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Live Patients Lie
A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association advises that up to 80% of patients have lied to their doctor about information that could impact their health, including accurately describing their food options and how often they exercise. When survey participants explained their reasoning for doing so, they said that they wanted…
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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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Have we lost the importance of touch?
Touch can show gentleness and compassion, or it can show carelessness or incompetence. Many of our patients feel that being touched is important to getting better. Gentle touching when examining an injured area, inspecting an irritated and angry skin patch or just comforting a person who hasn’t had an ideal medical diagnosis has become a…
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Pharmacy Anywhere – A System for Pharmacy Enhanced Primary Care
It is now well over 20 years ago that i2P proposed that community pharmacy develop a system we titled “Pharmacy-In-The-Home”. The reason for such a proposal was because of the predictions for an ageing population demographic, expanding and potentially reaching a figure of 28 percent of total population. We argued that an ageing population would…
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Bypass the AMA if Collaborative Ventures are Required for Unmet Patient Needs
It is becoming apparent that the medical profession leadership has clearly “lost the plot” in direction-setting, patient engagement and collaborative health when you analyse statements attributable to AMA leaders at their recent national conference. Cries that GP’s feel “under assault” through pharmacists encroaching into “their” territory of vaccinations and sick certificates, with no mention of better…
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A Sensible Community Pharmacy & GP Collaboration
In a win for commonsense, a professional collaboration between community pharmacists and local GP’s coupled with a simultaneous a solution for a major public health problem, a mutually respectful system has been piloted in the County of Staffordshire in the UK. And patients involved in the pilot study have documented high levels of satisfaction, simply because…
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The Medical Profession Leadership – Is Their Pharmacy Rant a cry for a Direction?
The medical profession has always promoted itself as being the leading health modality with all other health formats and modalities being inferior. It has reinforced that vision through the lens of adopting power politics as its primary marketing strategy. This meant that instead of being respectful and gaining the collaborative support of all other health…
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Is Health a Team Game Anymore?
Interesting statement from the outgoing AMA president where he says that “if we go farming off little elements of health care to pharmacy and other health professionals, we lose out”. I interpret that as simply “we doctors make less money” but in my view, the patient benefits wonderfully in most instances. The recent exchanges on…
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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…