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Have we lost our therapeutic gaze?
How often do we listen quickly to a request, or to a brief description of some symptom picture? Do we really give our patients our 100% focus, and dismiss the temptation to avert our gaze from that patient in front of you to catch the attention of another person? I hear similar things from patients…
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Pro Bono Pharmacy Services Create a Social Dividend
Pharmacists have always embraced a culture where service provision for health problems have been provided free of charge to local communities, while the physical product that resulted as a solution to those health problems attracted a monetary value. In contrast, GP’s charged for their services (consultations) and basically avoided selling products. Given that pharmacists and…
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Scotland’s Pharmacist Practitioner Champions
Perhaps it is because of my Scottish heritage, but I am continually dawn to the Scottish business model for community pharmacy, funded and developed in a genuine partnership between community pharmacists and government. One of its lesser publicised components is the funding of “Practitioner Champions”. It’s not a lot of money (£300,000 funding for this year),…
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The Productivity Commission Recommendation to decouple pharmacists from dispensing mirrors a progressive Scottish community pharmacy culture
Community Pharmacy Scotland (CPS) is the organisation which represents community pharmacy owners throughout Scotland in almost every aspect of their working lives, and is the voice of these vital healthcare professionals north of the English Border, as they deliver pharmaceutical care to the people of Scotland. It is therefore, the Scottish equivalent of the Pharmacy…
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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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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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Clinical Services – What Patients Will Pay For
Pharmacists have always been well regarded by their patients for their ability to deliver health literacy programs, over the counter in semi-private spaces in roughly three to five minute segments. Generally, this service has been delivered free of charge and it has formed a nearly invisible component of “core” business. Only invisible because it was free,…
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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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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…