Keynote abstract
The presentation will describe my normal working day in the community pharmacy and show you how multifaceted the challenges are.
What really happens in a community pharmacy?
Most people just realise that pharmacists dispense medicines to their patients. Some people even are aware that pharmacists give advice to their customers. But very few people recognise that it is the main job of a community pharmacist to find the best possible solution for a problem that even might be hidden.
Here are some examples:
- There is a patient who is convinced that his flatulency is caused by his statine. Can statines really cause flatulence?Is the patient a hypochondriac? Or is there another reason for the Problem?
- A seventy-year-old patient wants to have his pills against dizziness.What is the proper procedure?
- A thirty-year-old lady tells she suffers from nausea with vomiting attacks. Is an antiemeticum the correct solution?
Fortunately we are very well educated at university. We learn a lot about Pharmacology, Pharmacotherapy, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Physics and Pharmaceutical Technology and so on. This knowledge is the basis of our profession. But – may bee - we need a little bit more to do a good job as community pharmacist.
We should realise that we have to deal with humans and all their personal wants, their needs and their problems. And this is quite different to – fore example – scientific- or industrial problems.
Some times the challenge consists in finding the right way of talking to the customer or asking the right question to the right person and some times in finding a very sophisticated solution for a serious problem.
In the lecture I will raise some questions linked with my daily work in the community pharmacy and show you how I try to handle different and sometimes strange situations.
Some of these questions will be:
- How important is what we learned at university? Is it just theoretic stuff or an important basic component of our day-to-day work?
- Do we use our scientific know how?
- How can we combine our knowledge with our experience in our day-to-day work?
- How can we find out the real needs of the patient (or do we just fulfil what he/she asks)?
In some situations we might feel tested by our patients.
- Do we have the knowledge concerning a very detailed and sometimes complicated question?
- How can we find out a proper solution?
Do we fulfil the very high expectations of our customers in a community pharmacist every day? What polls say about our reputation.
Is our work important just for the individual patient in the pharmacy or can we contribute to public health in a wide range? – Austrian experiences of the last decade can give us an answer. Many projects were run and pharmacists showed themselves very dedicated.
The impact to the population was tested and I will show some results in the presentation.
With this lecture I will share my experiences with you. I will indicate how important our work is for our patients and how wonderful and satisfying this work can be for every single pharmacist.
