Share your thoughts: Scroll down to post a commentY’know. I was thinking. Most of the pharmacists in Canada are working stiffs who come into a pharmacy they don’t own, or have any commercial interest in, and try to practice their profession. In Ontario, there are plenty of rumblings related to the government's activities around pharmaceutical pricing, and the resulting consternation of pharmacy businesses, who see their well-established business models threatened. With this comes questions about what pharmacies will do to respond to this threat. Maybe threaten to withdraw from certain benefits plans, as has already happened recently. This would be harder with the government-administered Ontario Drug Benefit plan, but maybe threats of reduced service levels or hours will come up again, as they have in the past.What does all this have to do with the poor schleps who work in someone else’s dispensary every day?Well, to start with, if you don’t accept somebody’s drug plan, sometimes people will decide not to get the drugs they need. That won’t be good for them.And if you are trying to crowd the same amount of work into condensed hours with less help, assuming you don’t sit around twiddling your thumbs all day, you’ll be less able to do the things you need to do to ensure patient safety, let alone try to elevate your practice the way everyone says you ought to, and need to.We hear that these things could happen, if things don’t go in a way that payers and pharmacies can live with.But, has anybody asked that majority of pharmacists what they think? The ones who don’t traditionally get involved in the negotiations, discussions, haggling, positioning and threatening that goes on between payers and businesses. The ones who are professionally responsible for the quality of care that patients receive (and maybe ethically and morally responsible as well). The ones who every day come face-to-face with the public they help. How do they feel about these issues, which threaten their ability to provide service to people who need it?Will we ever know?
