Pharmacy U news

As wildfires become a more common threat worldwide, understanding the impact of air pollution and wildfire smoke on our health is crucial. In this 3 minute clip, Dr. Peter Lin, MD, sheds light on this issue.

Leadership skills can be learned. These are skills that anyone and everyone can learn and should learn! These are skills that can reduce or eliminate the problems we face every day in our pharmacy lives. But for the most part we are left to learn the lessons on our own. As a result, we find ourselves playing in a game where we do not know the rules, and we become frustrated.

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.

There are good business reasons to adopt sound accounting practices. Detailed, exact books can help you assess your pharmacy’s financial performance and find areas of strength, weakness, opportunity and risk. They also make your life a lot easier when you have to deal with regulators, tax authorities or financial institutions. But they are absolutely essential when you want to sell your business for a good price.

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.

Over the last several months, I have observed so many leaders throughout the various areas of healthcare doing wonderful things. People on the cutting edge of care who are pushing for a brighter tomorrow for their patients, their colleagues and themselves. Yet, we still face major issues.

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.

Over the course of my career, I have become convinced that the lack of any formal, structured leadership training has been to the detriment of the profession of pharmacy. The lack of emphasis and equipping has produced far too many pharmacists who are risk averse and wait to see whether someone else has success before they will even consider trying something new. At the same time, the demand for care has never been greater or more complex.