Look into Canadian hospitals. Pharmacists are actually not involved in dispensing at all! Dispensing is performed by robots and technicians.
Innovative and patient-orientated=ambulatory care, or pharmaceutical care, not retail.
"Pharmacy is the only health care profession that is reimbursed primarily through sale of a product rather than for provision of patient-specific service."
Denzin NK, Metlin CJ. Incomplete professionalization: the case of pharmacy. Soc Forces 1966;46:375-81.
"The most truthful thing I can say about pharmacy practice is this: it is an occupation psychically bound to the act of providing medications to patients, but which knows that it must find a new reason for being."
Zellmer, 1996
ellmer WA. Searching for the soul of pharmacy. Am J Health-Syst Pharm 1996;53:1911-16.
This study found that only 2% of community chain pharmacists' time was devoted to activities involving disease management. Sleath and Campbell observe that "the profession has a long way to go in its efforts to convince the public (or itself) that the patient rather than the drug product is the social object of the profession."
Sleath B, Campbell W. American pharmacy: a profession in the final stage of dividing? J Soc Admin Pharm 1998;15:225-40.
Just something to think about, everybody.
I will agree that pharmacy has a long way to go before realizing its full potential. I will also agree that the public has a misconception about the field and does not recognize it as a service as it truly is.
But by your logic, shouldn't someone like a transplant surgeon be considered to be a salesman as well? In that instance the surgeon in question provides a tangible product, the organ in question, and is reimbursed for those services. How is that different from a pharmacist dispensing medications?
You are, more or less, throwing your retail colleagues under the bus referring to them as salesman/woman and, by extension of other comments, unethical.
There are a lot of services pharmacy COULD provide. I did not say they are, but I said that they could and would move in a direction away from dispensing. Lets face it, you won't make money in a retail pharmacy selling cards and kicking prescriptions out the door. Those days are quickly ending.
The only way they will continue to survive, at least on the independent side of things, is to branch out into unique services. I know of pharmacies which solely focus on diabetes care for their patients. 90% of their patients are diabetics and they, along with an MD and two NPs, readily work on maintaining the quality of life for the patient.
Now in that instance, is the pharmacist a salesman and only looking out for their bottom line?
