Jump over to Engadget to check out the whole story, but just my two cents on the article here. If the title didn’t tip you off, you may now find yourself selling various electronic items at your humble, or expansive, pharmacy…

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Lots of facebook pages out there on pharmacy, more interestingly their focus on the topic of hating pharmacy. Some single out their employers as the reason for hating it, others square their fustration directly at the profession itself. I will be curious to have a look through some of these in more detail and will post any of the more interesting ones I can find.

Mostly US based companies get the sharp end of the stick on this one, the Australian companies don’t get the same treatment, maybe it’s a reflection on the comfort level of working in Australia or the way we are (hopefully better) treated by our bosses? Or maybe in Australia we are not as flippant to start a facebook page on any thought that enters our mind. That’s not a dig at those who start a facebook pages because they got rid of the purple colored Fruit Loop, or whatever, just it’s not as common practice to get social networking involved in every grievance we have. (more…)

One of last year’s batch of GSK swine flu vaccines stopped being used because of some reactions that were noticed. Fair enough, the odd part is the comment made by the spokesman for Canada’s health minister who said “We’re not seeing any thing wild or spooky or crazy about our vaccine at all.”

I’m not sure that’s the best possible wording as an official statement from a government health representative. But mildly entertaining nonetheless. Much like when you refer to drugs as “this stuff” to an elderly customer and they look at you like you just swore at them by using casual language. I get it, people are very touchy about their drugs. We have a way of getting complacent about our attitude towards drugs because to us they’re just meds, to others, it is “their” medication for “their” bodies. Which is something we need to consider when we talk to people. While with a younger person we can be more causal in our approach, but with our more senior customers, we need to take a more serious, still friendly, but respectful attitude when we refer to the medications. I have seen flippant attitudes given, sometimes accidentally when a staff member is in a hurry to get to the next customer, but it will leave your customer with a bad impression..

Well, there you go, this site is now about a year old. Yes, I’m not going to look up exactly when it went ‘live’ but knowing the month is good enough. In celebration Bayer have decorated their building as per the picture. Nah, not really…

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While I like to keep an eye on pharmacy goings on I missed an article on Monash University’s Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences faculty in regards to Acrux Ltd, a biotech company which was started in ‘98 as a spin off from the uni.

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Man, that’s a lot of pens.

For those in withdrawal since the ceasing of free drug branded miscellaneous items, enjoy this pic of the good ol’ days.

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I skimmed an interesting, somewhat long, article about the status of lab coats in the profession. It is titled ‘What Should Pharmacists Wear?’ and can be found here. PJ Careers is a UK based pharmacy job advertisement service that appears to be quite widely distributed in that region. In Australia, the pharmacist’s coat (lab coat, white coat or whatever you want to call it) seems to have been out of favor for a good period of time before a slight resurgence in the past couple of years.

Ah...professionalism!

University was the good life. Even if you were working in a pharmacy at the time your technical knowledge didn’t really have to be up to scratch. We probably don’t like to admit it, but as a pharmacy student and intern, you mostly expected to not know things. As soon as that day clicks over and you are what it says on your degree, you suddenly need to know everything. While I say that with a sense of absurdness, no one can know everything, there is definitely that expectation particularly from the non-pharmacists you deal with. Not only are you expected to know about drugs, but pretty much anything medically related.

Copyright 20th Century Fox, and Apple...I guess?

Shameless plug indeed (Pharmageeky But Maybe Sorta Cool Shirts). I kinda had some ideas for pub crawl shirts back in the day (I sound old saying that right?) but the ones that were eventually made mostly seemed to suck. So as a delayed creative outlet and way to make a couple of bucks (literally, it ain’t much) I’ve designed my own pharmacy themed shirts available to anyone.

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The weird video gaming antiquities that turn up never cease to amaze me. This one is an early 90s PC point and click style adventure game. ‘Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist’ is a game where you play as the title character who owns a pharmacy in the old west and keeps his past life a secret…yes, it’s as strange as it sounds. I read that this came about when one of the game’s creators tried to say frontier and rancher quickly and somehow spat out a word that sounded like pharmacist, so that’s the direction it went.

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It’s great that our inner geek enjoys learning about the strange ways in which some of the medications on our shelf have come about, but customers might not necessarily get the same kick out of it as we do.

Some of the more chattier of us when counseling might go into a little too much detail about the medication we are talking about. We might be encouraged by the patient’s curiosity and questions that we might find ourselves letting them know some unnecessary information into the production process of their cute lil pink tablet. Warfarin is one where I’ve heard someone mention to the customer that it came from rat poison, or basically is rat poison. While that’s kinda interesting for us, it isn’t very reassuring to the patient. If they already haven’t heard that about warfarin, and many people have, their next question is how does it work as a rat poison, to which you say “well the rats basically bled out etc….now please have this tablet with your lunch. Right-o then, off you go, enjoy.” (more…)

It seems customers have lost the plot when it comes to owings. I am not sure if this is the same general term used overseas, but in Australia, when we give a few tablets to get someone by if deemed urgent enough if they don’t have a script (but we have evidence of their medication history), we give them an ‘owing’ (usually between one and three days supply).

I get that this image isn't totally relevant to the post, but I like it, so there.

Just a short post, to all those will a day off enjoy it, whether you are watching the Australian Open or hiding from the warm weather. To those working…that sucks, but hopefully people assume you’re closed so you won’t get many customers anyway.

I’m not sure about you, but I try to keep my customer details private. Whether that is when I am counseling them on a new script or talking about a product while in the shop area. I’m not sure if one direction I’ve noticed recently is the best to preserve confidentiality…

SHHH. ZIP IT!

Do you think we are given an “allowance” for how many mistakes, or how serious a mistake, we can make before we need to be deregistered? A Detroit website has posted an article regarding a family suing Rite Aid over a dispensing error (http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/22035731/detail.html). The family are also chasing up the oncologist for writing an incorrect script.

The article  is an interesting read, a very sad read, but one that makes you think about what is an appropriate punishment for these and other dispensing errors. At what point does a license get taken away and you are deemed not competent to work? Even if it’s the first mistake in your career, if it’s a significant one that a reasonable person, or a peer, would think that one of the safeguards or processes in your dispensing should have alerted you to it – should you be deregistered? (more…)