Y’know, I thought it might be helpful to crystallize the problem the pharmacy profession is facing nationally.When you speak to pharmacists about the uncertain future our profession is facing, they universally respond that pharmacists will never stick together, that they are sheep willing to let someone else decide where they go and what they do, and that they are powerless to make a difference.They are right and wrong at the same time. They are reflecting the sentiment that the large majority of pharmacists have, but their conclusions are completely incorrect.Think about your day in the dispensary, or hospital pharmacy, or in other clinical and patient practices. You spend it solving problems, and often marveling at the interventions you make (the magnitude of their impact and that without you, that intervention would not have happened), followed by bad things that could happen.You also think about doing more, recognizing that it probably doesn’t seem practical because of the usual time and money barriers, while reflecting on the many things you do that waste your skills and knowledge because that is the way things are done.If you had your way, you would get paid to help patients in all the ways you can, and the barriers (from time wasted on unimportant or improperly assigned duties to lack of access to information, procedures and technology that could help you work more efficiently) would be addressed to allow this to happen.But who wants this to happen besides you? Expecting governments to understand, appreciate and enact policies that invest in one area to save much more in others seems futile, given their structure and history. Employers comfortable with a particular business model that has served them well will delay any change to an uncertain (from a profitability and control perspective) model for as long as possible. All the other professions see us in competition with them, despite rhetoric about professional collaboration. Patients would ultimately benefit, but their sophistication about pharmacists’ potential to make their lives happy and healthy is sadly lacking.So you know what should happen. But everything seems against you. What can you do?It is time to size up, wise up, and rise up. Pharmacists need to take hold of their profession by knowing all of the issues, filtering through the garbage, and taking an active role. Talk to government on your own—we all have politicians in our area. Tell your boss you want to raise your professional profile. Show the other professions why they are better off with you than against you. Let your patients know how much you can help.I know this is the same lament. We don’t need a revolution (after all, that usually means going in a circle and coming back to where you started) but the right evolution. As a professor said to me many years ago, it is not about survival of the fittest, it is about who gets to procreat. In the animal world, the one who chirps the loudest or is the showiest or shows strength and determination is the one who gets to multiply, and ultimately to survive. As for the ones who fade into the background? Well, whatever they had to contribute to the future just disappears.Will the pharmacists of the future look like you?
