Pharmacy

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.

Pharmacy can learn from a world-class Finnish education system by bringing more prestige, calibre and preparedness to our managers. We can also creatively find ways to make the job more fun and autonomous. We can also shift to treating our lowest skilled staff to their potential instead of their current status quo.

When I graduated as a pharmacist, the horizon that awaited me was to start working in the community pharmacy and improve the healthcare model, going from a model centred on the product, to a model centred on the person and on professional pharmaceutical services assistance.

In the world of medications, we want patients to take their appropriately prescribed medications regularly to obtain the intended benefit. Is this done through compliance or adherence? The intent of the two terms is the same, but the spirit is entirely different. And it’s the spirit that counts in the end when leading patients to take their medications.

The shift in recognizing obesity as a chronic disease, rather than simply a lifestyle issue, has elevated the importance of its management within healthcare. Pharmacists are excited because this change aligns with their focus on chronic disease management and provides new opportunities to address obesity with the same seriousness as diabetes or hypertension.

Make no mistake, as leaders, it is important to develop the people around us. This is not limited to support staff. It also includes helping to develop our peers and even the people we report to. When we develop people, we increase the overall capacity of the organization, and we instill an increased feeling of ownership with our team members.

When Betty Golightly decided to add travel health services to her Calgary practice, she committed to offering the highest quality of care. “My goal when I started this program was to deliver the best possible pre-travel consultation provided by any healthcare professional.”

In pharmacy, the iceberg principle will apply at each step of promotion along the various dispensary or head office jobs. This will also apply in the change from managerial to ownership roles. We can only see what we understand and the truth hits home when we finally step inside.