Taking our eyes off the ball.

[Pharmanaut]

Seems to me that we have been listening far too long to the armchair element of the profession and the non-pharmacist types who seem to be taking it over.

What we do and what we do well is manage the medicines supply chain to make sure that patients get their medicines on time, everytime; with the right medicine, right quantiy, right dose with a few other associated services on top of that related to understanding of medication and importance of safe use/ With the increase in prescription numbers this is enough for anyone to do. We are the only ones who seem to have a sense of urgency about the supply of medicines.
Anything done well without fuss looks easy. This is an important job; lets not shy away from it or cease to tell everyone how important it is.

[kexin]

Albeit, an important job, it barely holds its weight if anyone is to use supply of medicines in their arguement to solidify the importance of a pharmacist's role in providing health care. This issue goes way back to the 1980s along with the Nuffield report. Pharmacists (especially those in community) can do more than jsut play 'snap' with prescriptions and boxes of medicines.

There are and will be individuals who are content with just supplying, but if by shying away from medicine supply do you imply that pharmacists are being idle in their work place? Surely not! Would it be more beneficial for the pharmacists to allocate his/her time to engage, for example, in delivering public health services rather than managing the medicines supply chain? The answer is debatable but I believe we need not dwell too much on over emphasising the core and routine section of our jobs and should embrace the newer roles that are available.

[hibernia]

The answer is debatable but I believe we need not dwell too much on over emphasising the core and routine section of our jobs and should embrace the newer roles that are available.

Embracing newer roles is all very well but the problem is the nobody is paying for them, or if they are they are using money taken from payment for supply.

Until such time as there is a demand for the newer roles from either the public or the state who see their value and are willing to pay a fair rate for them they can only be a small part of our workload.

It is the core and the routine that sustains everything. Buying and preparing food is routine and usually pretty boring but stop doing it for a few days and see what happens. Same with medicines. Just because we do it all day, every day without fuss doesn't make it any less important.