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A National Community Pharmacy Minor Ailment Program – Scotland is there, Australia is where?
The UK has long been a beacon, lighting the way for pharmacists to be fully integrated into the healthcare team through clinical expertise. Scotland in particular has been very successful in gaining political support and recognition for pharmacy expertise, actual and potential. Community pharmacy in the UK and Australia has long been a first resource…
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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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Why Amazon’s Entry to the Australian Pharmacy Market May Drive Cultural Change, New Innovation and Promote Young Pharmacists
Amazon is about to enter the Australian retail market and is known to be interested in adding pharmacy to its retail mix of products and services. Amazon has developed “entry point technology” to a consumer’s home. It is called the Echo system and it is powered by voice activation technology called “Alexa” which is of…
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“Pushy” customers or are they merely “informed”?
I was rather puzzled when reading an article on the challenges of a “pushy” customer and the pressures placed on student pharmacists. I’m puzzled because we, in pharmacy, have lost the skills of listening. We have become so “medicalised” that we now seem to “tell” rather than “partner in a satisfactory outcome”. Whether the educators…
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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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Guardrails – Why they Need Continual Analysis and exist with a Balanced Direction
Guardrails “A large, freshly-paved parking lot has no boundaries. You can drive in any direction, free to speed to your destination. But once there’s more than a few cars driving, traffic stops. It’s too risky, there are too many uncertainties. A car could come at you from any direction, and so we crawl. Flow is…
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Micro-practice – Future Direction for Pharmacy
I2P has long proposed that pharmacy attracts two types of consumers – customers and patients. A little reflection will resolve this issue because clearly, customers will be attracted to the more commercialised aspects of pharmacy that compete with retailing in general, and the reason why pharmacists see their major competitors as supermarkets and variety stores.…
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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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Collaboration- What does it mean for health professions?
The new “buzz” word floating around the health professions is “collaboration”. In the same breath it is linked to other expressions such as “patient-centred homes” or “patient-centred neighbourhoods”. But what does it all mean – particularly when referenced in respect of community pharmacy? Starting with the dictionary terminology we find collaboration means: 1. “the action…
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A Home Doesn’t Need to Have a Single Roof – Because it Might Need to be a Neighbourhood
The “buzz words” floating around the newly discovered world of primary health care are “Patient-Centred Homes”, a concept where a focus is generated on a patient through a triage process where patients are provided an efficient sequential introduction to the health resource most required by those patients under the one roof. Results to date in…