Greetings  Bristol!

I’m sorry I missed you in April, but I’m back for May! This month I will be addressing the future of the role of a pharmacist on your healthcare team. This is a big topic of interest to me lately, especially with the recent merger of two large insurance companies, Express and Medco.   Since the 1960s, pharmacy has been largely a commodity-based profession. That means we dispensed the product, set the price, and sold it as any other vendor would their wares. The Doctor of Pharmacy degree was largely unheard of and many physicians didn’t want the pharmacist to interfere in treatment of their patients, so there was virtually no requirement for counseling. There were significantly fewer mass-produced medications on the market and the pharmacist was still known to manufacture (“compound”) many of them himself.   Fast forward to the new millennium and the Health Care Reform changes being made. Many newly minted physicians have already been trained with pharmacists on hospital rounds and are used to us being part of the team. I find many of them to be grateful for our knowledge of the medications and to be able to refer their patients’ questions about their drug regimens to us. There is a movement within the American Pharmacist Association to develop the Primary Care Pharmacist by 2017. This is the vision of a new direction for the community-or retail-based pharmacist like myself. We can no longer bank on price competition and reimbursement from insurance companies to put ourselves ahead of the pack and stay in business to help our patients.   Therefore, my desire is to collaborate more with other health care providers in the area to be able to offer services you many have never before seen in a pharmacy. Medication therapy management, long term care counseling for the chronically ill, home visits, disease management classes, travel vaccination counseling, and Internet Q&A with a presence on Facebook and/or Twitter are all concepts I’m imagining to bring Bristol current in this vision for the new wave of pharmacy services. This won’t happen overnight and it will require significant changes over time, but if you bear with us, I really think you will be pleased. Please ask questions about any of these ideas, I’m happy to share what I am learning with anyone who is interested.

Now let’s keep the mood light with a joke for this month:

While working as a radiology technician in a hospital emergency room, I took some X-rays of a trauma patient and took the results to the senior radiologist, who studied the multiple fractures of the femurs and pelvis. ‘What on earth happened to this patient?’ he asked in astonishment.
‘He fell out of a tree,’ according to the report. The radiologist wanted to know what the patient was doing up a tree.
‘I’m not sure, but his paperwork states he works for Mark’s Expert Tree Pruning Service.’ Gazing intently at the X-rays, the radiologist blinked and said, ‘Cross out ‘expert.’

Katrina, Pharmacist, Mor for Less/Bristol Pharmacy 848-0660