Y’know, I read through several blogs lately; and the responses to them; and the responses to the responses; and the responses to the responses to the responses; and so on…I feel like I am back in grade school playing the telephone game, where you whisper something to the person next to you, it goes down the line, and what comes out the other end has little or nothing to do with what the first person said.It is evident in my blog, and in several others, that in fact most pharmacists agree a heck of a lot more than they disagree.And yet, we spend an inordinate amount of time on those disagreements, magnifying them, exaggerating them, and quite often inventing some.(I will provide an extreme example from one of my own blogs, although we see it in many others, and interestingly, usually when emotions get high.)It was stated more than once that I support RPI. To be clear, I have always hung up whenever they have called. (I suspect most of you do the same thing.) They are the lampreys of our profession.Yet, having read a couple of sentences back, I suspect someone will insert a period after “always have”, and delete the rest of the sentence. Such are the perils of putting it out for public consumption.That’s ok, though, because my spouse and children, the people most important to me, have also misunderstood me from time to time.It is part of the human condition of communication that, despite being clever enough to come up with hundreds (thousands?) of languages, we often get what the person meant to say wrong.So, here is the problem. We mostly agree, but waste a lot of time on what we don’t agree on. This despite the fact that there are so many important areas we need to improve in to lift the profession.For instance, we are incredibly valuable to our public. But, we do a lousy job of having them appreciate it, let alone educating them on how we can help and how important are services are.What's more, we can’t convince payers to appreciate our identity and self-determination problems, let alone care about them, even though we know they are so important to our future.And in the clinical environment (if we can get there through all the stuff pharmacists get forced to do that is not in the patient’s or professions best interests), we are still not nearly effective enough at developing a therapeutic relationship.Doing so demands using communication skills to get the whole story, understanding what is important to the patient, matching that to their clinical needs, and then using that information to achieve the best possible patient outcomes.So, let’s engage the primitive emotion of passion. (Not that kind of passion, which might be interesting but would change the blogosphere around here far too much.)I’m referring to the emotion that the French language has much cooler words for, like ardent, brouillant, enflammer, feru… (These may be out of context, but c’est la vie as my French does not cover the nuance).If you truly care about the profession of pharmacy, its survival, its growth, its potential, and about the patients out there who are not receiving the full benefit of all that pharmacy can bring, then let’s find out where we can agree.If you only care about making money, then join the corporates, owners, and others who have lost (or never had) a passion for the profession and go elsewhere.You might as well, as you will never understand those of us who give because it is the right thing to do—the right thing for patients, for the profession, and for pharmacists.Ken Burns is a pharmacist at the Diabetes Care Centre at Sudbury Regional Hospital.
