- 8/6/2024
Who knows where your next pharmacy hire will come from? People are our biggest investment yet we have little time to spend on dissecting résumés, making cold calls and conducting lame interviews. Over 15 years of being a pharmacist responsible for building teams, I have come to appreciate three ridiculously simple common traits familiar to the best staff that stuck.
- 7/30/2024
Thinking about pharmacy as the balance of taxi and Uber allows the big shifts to organically happen over time. It allows us to maintain the past and build the future while handholding the customer through the changes that affect their pharmacy visit experience.
- 7/23/2024
Your job is to create the systems and structures paired with people and resources that shift the balance of your prescription count as far to the predictable side as possible. Invest time and energy into knowing your patients and predicting what they need, when they need it and constantly scan for patient groups that can be standardized like synchronizing your monthly injectables and monthly blister co-pays.
- 7/16/2024
The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is most recently linked to social media but I believe it can be applied to a wider spectrum in an effort to support pharmacy leaders in their everyday lives. FOMO is an anxiety that an exciting event is occurring without us, flushing our brains with a depressed mood.
- 7/9/2024
Over the past two years, I have journaled about the anecdotes and lessons from over a decade of managing small and larger pharmacy teams, across corporate and independent models, both from retail and long-term-care. Across the multitude of journal entries, 7 key characteristics (which I call dimensions) show up recurrently. Enunciating them with very specific adjectives and placing them in an acronym allowed me to understand what to strive for in showing up for my patients, team and business.
- 7/2/2024
Raphael, is a great clinician and an extremely hard worker, capable of grinding through the heavy lifting the profession requires. But the demands of pharmacy life with higher expectations, rude customers, diminishing support staff and head office policies forced down his throat have all taken their toll.
- 6/18/2024
I have written about how triathlon is a lifelong journey than offers more than fitness. It forces me to dig deep and push boundaries of resiliency while balancing rest, sleep, nutrition, stress management, stretching and yoga. Triathlon has given me the other part of my identity that hibernates during the workweek. Opening the box and finding triathlon proved an amplification of who I am.
- 6/18/2024
In a pharmacy, you have rep staff, like the experienced ones who largely run your programs and who are recognized by patients and prescribers. You also have house league staff in those who work fewer hours per week or month.
- 6/11/2024
Navigating in pharmacy takes a mindset of being comfortable not always knowing what is just around the corner. In a world where we are used to setting goals and planning long term, we are forced into a new normal that has our answers unveiling themselves with less notice.
- 6/4/2024
There are countless decisions in pharmacy that we need to make even though they may be less than ideal or feel less than comfortable. As the profession continues to adapt to the complexity of healthcare, pharmacy will continue to change and that will mean having to make unpopular yet necessary decisions.
- 5/28/2024
A patient acted surprised when I refused to fill a virtual care order for high dose pregabalin after getting an electronic message that he already filled it somewhere else that day. Given that he received seven different pregabalin prescriptions in the past six months from seven different virtual care clinics located in various cities across Canada, my radar was on high alert.
- 5/21/2024
Hockey has been a big part of my life since the ages of VHS tapes and dial-up internet. While I no longer play competitively (or rewind my movies), I take pride in coaching my kids’ teams. It is here that I have come to realize a similar role hockey coaches and pharmacy managers play in enabling the difficult conversations.
