Editorial

From the desk of the editor

Welcome to the May 2012 homepage edition of i2P-Information to Pharmacists. Rollo Manning has been having some time out having staples removed from the site of his open heart surgery.He is now at home recuperating in Darwin, having arrived home last Friday, beating a cold and hasty retreat from Canberra.We all wish him a speedy recovery and hopefully, he will be fit enough to contribute by next month.
This month, Pharmedia discusses the toll that is taken when someone complains about you to an authority without good cause. Well, the good news is that you can now take action to protect yourself if such a complaint is made, and that may even include action for defamation. Read about a recent case involving two doctors, with Mark Coleman drawing on personal experience to illustrate.

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Roadmap to Ruin

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Neil Johnston articles by this author...

Neil Johnston is a pharmacist who trained as a management consultant. He was the first consultant to service the pharmacy profession and commenced practice as a full time consultant in 1972, specialising in community pharmacy management, pharmacy systems, preventive medicine and the marketing of professional services. He has owned, or part-owned a total of six pharmacies during his career, and for a decade spent time both as a clinical pharmacist and Chief Pharmacist in the public hospital system. He has been editor of i2P since 2000.

A recent story emerging from the APP Conference was a vision of Kos Sclavos waving a document around called “The Roadmap – The Strategic Direction for Community Pharmacy” that was supposedly a draft blueprint for professional services development.
It was incomplete and therefore not available for general view.
And you need to ask what purpose it served given the debate surrounding professional services over the past three years and the paucity of PGA development information.
Yet again the PGA has it wrong, as it appears that there was little input or collaboration with the PSA.

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Commenting, the PSA national president Warwick Plunkett said:

"PSA sees the Guild’s Roadmap as a welcome complement to the PSA Green paper announced last year which is an issues paper being crafted in consultation with the pharmacy profession as a whole.

The Guild’s Roadmap seems to be program-driven and while many of these programs will be beneficial to pharmacy, the Roadmap is let down by the apparent absence of any practice support for these programs."

In other words it is not a good idea to have a range of top down programs developed by other countries that discounts the people that have to operate these programs.

It's also not rocket science to know that professional services represent an excellent opportunity for community pharmacies to partner clinical pharmacists in a mutual collaboration – the pharmacies provide the best infrastructure and environment for service providers selling professional services out of their own practice companies.

Total business generated by professional services companies would provide a range of opportunities for both sides. The pharmacies would still have charge of the product sales generated, and they would be at a higher volume and more professionally generated than what is currently on offer.

The PGA vision of the pharmacy owning everything is patently wrong and divisive and allows little opportunity for all pharmacists to share a vision for the future.

It is more like a “Roadmap to Ruin”.

Maybe it is time for the PSA to encourage new forms of pharmacies to emerge.

One idea suggested is to form up a series of “training pharmacies” where facilities are purpose built to encourage professional service providers and an environment where PSA training could be implemented to ensure a practical working environment to train up new pharmacists to offer new services.

With the proper balance of government subsidies, practitioner capital and pharmacy infrastructure capital there is little doubt that this type of activity would flourish profitably and provide professional satisfaction at all levels.

Shareholders in this type of investment can include pharmacists from all areas – individual contractor and employed pharmacists, existing pharmacy owners, retired pharmacists and newly graduated pharmacists.

It is definitely time for a change and training pharmacies would also be eligible for Guild membership.

A more vocal and active PGA membership may shine the light on some of the more impractical policies and expenditure emanating from the PGA currently and bring the balance back to a more respectful centre view of the world.

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