How to increase pharmacy awareness
Increasing pharmacy awareness begins with individuals
and is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week process, Professor Zubin Austin,
University of Toronto, Canada, told pharmacy students at a symposium on
5 September.
Professor Austin was speaking at the joint FIP/International
Pharmaceutical Students Federation day, which took as its theme “The role
of the pharmacist in raising pharmacy awareness”. He said that everyone
in the profession was an ambassador for pharmacy and urged those present
to dev-elop a culture of ongoing care.
There were ways of building awareness. Pharmacists
needed to recognise and exploit the fact that they had multiple audiences,
including patients, customers, doctors, etc. They needed to target awareness
campaigns and demonstrate exactly what they did rather than focussing
on futuristic ideas. The goal was to increase the understanding of the
pharmacist’s role among other health care professionals and the public.
All of this would help to change pharmacists’ perception
of their own role. Pharmacists perceived that their role as a drug specialist
was unknown, that their knowledge and skills were undervalued and underused,
and that there was a lack of respect for the work that they did.
Indeed, said Professor Austin, there was a general
perception in all countries that pharmacists were underused in their health
care systems. But there was a problem in that the good work of pharmacists
was rarely reported in the press. News about “bad” pharmacists, however,
nearly always made it into the media.
Earlier in his presentation to the pharmacy students,
Professor Austin outlined how customers and doctors perceive pharmacy.
He said that studies in North America had shown that users of pharmacy
services viewed themselves as “customers” and not as “patients” of pharmacists.
They most definitely did not see themselves as “consumers”. When pharmacists
referred to their customers as patients, the customers felt uncomfortable
because they saw themselves as “patients” of doctors and dentists. They
accepted the pharmacist as the most accessible health care professional
and they liked the fact that no appointment was necessary to see him or
her.
Customers viewed pharmacists in four ways. First,
the pharmacist was a health educator, someone who could provide customers
with health information. Second, the pharmacist was a care giver through
the medicines that he or she provided. Third, the pharmacist was viewed
as a friend. He or she was someone whom customers could approach for advice
and reassurance. He or she was a “sounding board” for a patient’s concerns.
Fourth, the pharmacist was viewed as a guardian angel — the patient’s
protector or advocate.
Professor Austin stressed that this was how customers
saw pharmacists. Although pharmacists might be insulted by the fact that
their customers saw them as friends and consider that to be indicative
of a lack of respect, they should not. Patients rarely viewed their doctors
as friends.
Pharmacy customers had made some suggestions as
to how pharmacy awareness could be inproved. There should be better and
easier identification of the pharmacist in a pharmacy, greater access
to the pharmacist should be promoted, and there should be separate retail
and professional areas within pharmacies. Customers hoped that pharmacists
would remain approachable and convenient.
The same research had shown that doctors viewed
pharmacists as being more interested in business than in care, said Professor
Austin. They also believed that pharmacists were trying to overstep boundaries
and act like doctors, and that they only contacted doctors when there
was a problem. However, doctors wanted ongoing access to one pharmacist;
they found it frustrating not knowing to whom they were going to talk
when they telephoned a pharmacy.
Doctors also believed that pharmacists should be
seen as a reliable and objective source of health information and should
become more involved in the economics of health care.
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