Pharmacy U news

Who knows where your next pharmacy hire will come from? People are our biggest investment yet we have little time to spend on dissecting résumés, making cold calls and conducting lame interviews. Over 15 years of being a pharmacist responsible for building teams, I have come to appreciate three ridiculously simple common traits familiar to the best staff that stuck.

Pharmacies are MORE than a place where medications are dispensed. But far too many pharmacists are married to a definition like this. When I ask pharmacy students what pharmacists do, I get a response like: “Pharmacists are the medication experts.” That may very well be true. But pharmacists are so much more.

As wildfires become a more common threat worldwide, understanding the impact of air pollution and wildfire smoke on our health is crucial. In this 3 minute clip, Dr. Peter Lin, MD, sheds light on this issue.

Leadership skills can be learned. These are skills that anyone and everyone can learn and should learn! These are skills that can reduce or eliminate the problems we face every day in our pharmacy lives. But for the most part we are left to learn the lessons on our own. As a result, we find ourselves playing in a game where we do not know the rules, and we become frustrated.

Thinking about pharmacy as the balance of taxi and Uber allows the big shifts to organically happen over time. It allows us to maintain the past and build the future while handholding the customer through the changes that affect their pharmacy visit experience.

There are good business reasons to adopt sound accounting practices. Detailed, exact books can help you assess your pharmacy’s financial performance and find areas of strength, weakness, opportunity and risk. They also make your life a lot easier when you have to deal with regulators, tax authorities or financial institutions. But they are absolutely essential when you want to sell your business for a good price.

Your job is to create the systems and structures paired with people and resources that shift the balance of your prescription count as far to the predictable side as possible. Invest time and energy into knowing your patients and predicting what they need, when they need it and constantly scan for patient groups that can be standardized like synchronizing your monthly injectables and monthly blister co-pays.

Over the last several months, I have observed so many leaders throughout the various areas of healthcare doing wonderful things. People on the cutting edge of care who are pushing for a brighter tomorrow for their patients, their colleagues and themselves. Yet, we still face major issues.