Pharmacy

The good old pharmacy model saw the pharmacist as the firefighter and the architect, with burnout waiting around the corner. This one-person band put out fires and built buildings. However, since pharmacy is much more complex today, we find that the traditional jack-of-all-trades pharmacist divided into two different people.

Too often, we “recruit” for our teams and processes. We fill gaps with what's available, sometimes settling for what works “for now.” Maybe we hire a support staff member because we urgently need help, and once the position is filled, we stop thinking about what could be better.

We need to unite before we can tackle the external forces fighting us. Another challenge stems from a lack of understanding of the role of the pharmacist itself, from the healthcare industry and patients alike, who still see the pharmacist as a shopkeeper or pill counter.

Across years of experience practising pharmacy, a pharmacist may go through a natural incline in ego during a steep initial learning phase, followed by a plateau. Here pharmacists have seen many of the more intense challenges already and the number of new headaches flattens out. Finally, towards approximately the last third of the pharmacists’ career, they begin feeling less driven by ego and let the problems around them simmer or settle.

Pharmacy professionals are well placed to deliver routine immunizations to those in their communities. As more seasonal and routine vaccines become available, the discussion at Pharmacy U Vancouver will discuss the enablers and barriers to pharmacists playing an integral role in mobilizing vaccination in their pharmacy practice.

Over the years, it has become increasingly obvious to me that the heart of so many of our struggles as pharmacists comes from a lack of good leadership skills. This is not surprising. There was minimal emphasis on leadership skills during my formal education.

In 2007, I found myself accepting a promotion to help develop clinical programs for pharmacists across multiple states. But what started as excitement soon turned to concern as it hit me like a ton of bricks that I would now be finding myself in some of the largest cities in North America.

The problem with pharmacy is that it is all practice. It is training without race day. The daily grind offers much of the same training as it did the day before. After a short time, we become jaded. We practise with repetitive questions, monotonous problems, completing the daily-weekly-monthly tasks and draft endless calendars.