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Health by Stealth!
Are we being complicit in accepting the gradual lowering of thresholds for various treatments? There’s some interesting discussions at the moment on the Cholesterol Treatment Trialist’s Collaboration. This is an international group of doctors and statisticians that includes Australia’s NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre. This collaboration seems to have a dogmatic approach to advocating the wider…
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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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Blockchain – a trust system that could underwrite health information exchanges and integrate with other trust systems.
Blockchain is a relatively new technology system that can be customised to transact trusted actions, not being under a centralised control involving governments or banks. It is closely associated with the concept of Bitcoin, which is described as a form of financial currency called “cryptocurrency”. Many new cryptocurrencies have been launched, most emulating Bitcoin’s success in…
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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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Scottish pharmacy – a public/private partnership that encourages pharmacist clinical development.
Scotland has long displayed a talent for identifying the care role for pharmacists and expanding that role by supporting clinical aspirations for pharmacists, and made central to their total National Health Service delivery. The HealthierScotlandStrategy document published in August 2017 and titled ‘Achieving Excellence in Pharmaceutical Care’ aims to “strengthen the role of pharmacy in both hospital and…
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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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Blockchain – disruptive technology behind “cryptocurrencies” and now set to invade health.
A blockchain is defined as a distributed database that can maintain an ever-expanding list of records (called “blocks”) without the need for a trusted administrator or a central server, instead relying on a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. Each block contains a time stamp and a link to a…
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Location Rules Need to be Re-purposed
For the best part of 12 months it has been an open secret that Location Rules for pharmacies would pass muster as being of sufficient “public benefit” for them to remain in place. Even the chair of the King Review very early in his investigation, appeared to favour retention of the rules. For those of…
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Health Literacy – A Concept for a Valid Direction for Community Pharmacy
Recently, I had a conversation with a health professional involved in the public health system. Research had emerged that large pockets of populations were experiencing epidemic levels of chronic illness such as obesity, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. These population pockets correlated with areas of low socio-economic households where people had generally poor diets and…
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Soil Health Impacts Human Health – A New Perspective to Consider
Are pharmacists fully engaged with the full spectrum of health and an understanding of their patient’s lifestyle? Some information currently appearing in this edition of i2P suggests that Health Literacy ought to be a prime focus for pharmacists to assist their patients in understanding what impacts exist that are involved in health changes that can…