Personalized Medicine and The Pharmacist

WHY PHARMACIES SHOULD ALL BE OWNED/OPERATED BY PHARMACISTS

1. Corporations create an environment incompatible with pharmacy practice

Large surface stores are modelled on high volume sales, low profit margins, simple products and low consumer interaction. Pharmaceutical care, on the other hand, centers around the needs of individual patients as well as complex and potentially dangerous technologies (i.e. pharmaceutical drugs). Selling warfarin in a one-stop location next to the toilet paper, chocolate and big screen televisions subconsciously conveys to the patient that their prescription is like any other consumer good; it should be cheap and it should be fast. This practice endangers the safety of the patient by trivializing the risks associated with pharmacotherapy and the information provided by the pharmacist during pharmaceutical counselling.

Additionally, the corporate environment imposes on the pharmacist unattainable goals which compromise pharmaceutical care. The performance of employed pharmacists is not assessed on their merits as good healthcare providers but rather on the number of prescriptions processed in any given day. Under such circumstances, medication review, pharmacovigilance, pharmaceutical counselling and continuation of care are set aside in order to maximize sales per hour.          

2. Corporations are inflexible entities

Pharmaceutical needs of individual patients are varied and unique. A given patient may require a compounded medicine, a veterinary product, a brand name medication, a prescription delivered after hours or simply social interaction. Such characteristics are incompatible with the inflexible large corporation model of chain-assembled goods. The real-life result is that patients are routinely refused pharmaceutical care, or referred elsewhere, due to high cost-to-profit ratios and time constraints. As pharmacy students, many of us have witnessed or heard about the atypical patient which the pharmacy staff would rather avoid servicing.        

3. Private enterprise stimulates quality of service and innovation

Pharmacy is unavoidably linked with consumerism. When corporate monopolies are removed, free enterprises in a competitor-rich environment must rely on a distinctive edge other than simple price differentiation. Individual pharmacies must then fight for the satisfaction and loyalty of patients (aka consumers) or die. As a result, business-wise entrepreneurs emerge and thrive by offering better and newer services/goods (i.e. quality care, medication review, disease specialization, compounding, injection services, etc) and enrich the environment and practice. Eventually, these become standard practices until the next great innovation perpetuating the cycle of innovation and enterprise.     

4. Pharmacy ‘store-in-stores’ erodes pharmaceutical care and commodotizes the pharmacy

Pharmacies located within grocery stores, department stores, etc. relegate the service to merely another aisle or service counter in the store, allowing the service to decrease at the pharmacy without being acted on by the consumer. Because of the added convienience of shopping while a perscription is filled the lack of service may be overlooked as an opportunity cost of the convienence. As this happens, a decrease in care creaps into society and overall negatively affects both patient care and the profession.