A recent Canadian Press article said “McGuinty says it isn't the government's responsibility to ensure there's a particular kind of pharmacy industry in the province. “Do they have any responsibility to ensure that a particular health profession, namely pharmacy, continues to contribute to the treatment and management of disease for the people of Ontario, or are they going to throw the baby out with the bath water?CP also quoted McGuinty as saying “What really matters, is that people have access to affordable drugs and that there are enough pharmacies to ensure the prescriptions are available -- regardless of their size."The government is clearly out of touch with what is really happening in health care. He appears to believe that prescription factories are the answer, and that access to drugs, NOT pharmacists, is what really matters. Apparently, this government believes that it is important to get drugs into people's hands, and it doesn’t matter to the government whether they are the right drugs, or that they get used right, or that they even work. And all the other things that pharmacists do? That's not even on their radar.Most people have no idea about how pharmacists ensure that the right drugs get to the right people and are used right, so that people get better and not worse. What we do is only appreciated by those whom pharmacists have brought with them as they went through the steps of correcting a wrong drug or dose, or changing to one that doesn’t interact or is tolerated better, or just changing things to allow the patient to actually use the medications the right way. Most of that work is done quietly behind the scenes. More’s the pity, because when it is gone, and people are sicker and suffering more and dying sooner, will they even know what they lost? And that it didn’t have to be this way?But there is another thing that we do that no one else does. For almost every patient who travels the journey from health to sickness, and hopefully back again, the health care system is an impersonal place. It doesn’t care how long you wait, or how worried, confused, frustrated, and frightened you are. Pharmacists are at the end of a line of consultations, from seeing doctors and having tests done through to treatments chosen. And what we experience, with great regularity, is patients who finally, when they reach us, feel comfortable to ask us what it all means – what their disease means and how it affects them, and how it will change their life.They want to know what the treatments will do, how long they need to use them, and if bad things will happen because of them. They want someone they trust who appreciates their suffering, and who understands and empathizes with them that illness is not only physical, but emotional and spiritual as well. No one else does that like pharmacists do.Pharmacists are 'persons' in an impersonal health care system. And we are the only ones you can call, or come and talk to, whenever you want and need to.McGuinty clearly does not appreciate the people who are the underpinnings of health care delivery. His government believes that all pharmacists do is churn out prescriptions. They don’t see the world through our patient’s eyes, but we do. The government fails to recognize, or worse, does not care, that removing pharmacists from contact with our patients will mean that bad things will happen to them. And ultimately this battle isn’t about the pharmacy industry, but about a profession's ability to help the people it is dedicated to help.If that message fails to get through, then as a profession we will have failed.
