The New Role of the Pharmacist complete

Pharmacies are facing challenges with funding and closures, but there are also new opportunities for them to provide clinical services. Dr. Raj, a GP with experience in the evolving healthcare system, believes his experience can help pharmacists adapt to these changes. Communication skills are important when dealing with the public, and Dr. Raj emphasizes the need for proper training and support for pharmacists in this area. Preparation for customer consultations can be more difficult for pharmacists compared to GPs, as they may not have prior knowledge of the patient's medical issue. Effective communication within the pharmacy and with staff is crucial, and finding the right communication methods is essential. Dr. Raj suggests using tools like email, WhatsApp, and occasional meetings to keep everyone informed without overwhelming them. Balancing work and personal life is also important, and downtime should be prioritized. Appointment-based or walk-in services depend on the situation a Number 2, I am with Dr Raj from Lally's Pharmacy, just a quick re-generate, re-think, Dr Raj Raj, explain who you are and what you do sir? Yeah, I am Raj Lally, I have been a GP for a number of years, well over 10 years now, but I am quite involved in general health care, but pharmacy has always been in my blood to say, through my parents, so I have been sort of well involved in the pharmacy world through our personal pharmacies as well for a number of years as well also. Now the reason why we are doing this one is because certain things have been raised through, as everyone knows about what's happening to pharmacies and some of the issues that are currently raised. Explain what's happened over the last few weeks and few months about how pharmacies are going to be changing and dealing more with customers and public? Yeah, so pharmacies have gone through its general challenges as we all sort of know with things that happen with the NHS and just life in general, funding is tight. So that sometimes means that what filters down to services like ours is, it can cause issues in sort of day-to-day running of services, so people probably sort of heard on the news or just been aware from around where they live that there have been sort of pharmacy closures, there have been sort of pharmacies sort of consolidating, so you are getting fewer number of pharmacies that we might start seeing on our streets. So that has been challenging but at the same time, clearly the way pharmacies are going is also changing in terms of opportunities, so pharmacies are now able to do more clinical things and do sort of clinical work which has been essentially like a new sort of funding streams for pharmacies. So whilst at one stage, one end, there is that struggle in the day-to-day sort of running and operation of pharmacies that come through our sort of traditional funding, there is also the opportunities of actually get involved with sort of clinical services where there are sort of funding streams that end. Now one of the things we wanted to do was to act with your experience and your family's experience about what it's like to work in a pharmacy but also incorporate and encompass what's happening currently at the moment in the market. With regards to you being a GP, how can your experience help other pharmacists who are just, I would say, just setting out or currently looking at these changes in the systems and thinking, well, how are we going to handle this? I think my sort of experience comes from the clinical setting. So I've been involved with general practice for a while now and I've seen how general practice has evolved. So we all sort of know and remember when we used to go and access our GPs sort of well over 10 years ago, you would often always see just your GP, your GP only. And GP surgeries have sort of moved on from that model where you can have certain bits of healthcare where you don't need to see your GP, you could see a nurse practitioner, sometimes even a pharmacist that's working that practice or a healthcare assistant that's more sort of skilled to do various things that you can access your GP for. Now, I've seen that evolve in the GP world and it's not an overnight thing. It takes time for that skill set to improve for those individuals, but also even for patients to start to trust it and try to sort of really believe in that type of system. And it's still a work in progress. So with pharmacies now doing more clinical stuff, which is very, very new, very green, that's going to take a little bit of time. So someone like myself that has been involved in lots of bits of the healthcare system, hopefully understands that that workforce, that sort of challenge of training, that challenge of trusting your knowledge, not quite knowing something and knowing where to go, I think will help. And myself, and I've also sort of brought in other expectees, nurses, those sort of things that are helping from our group perspective to ensure that our pharmacists and other staff are sort of well-trained and will be well-acquainted to deal with those type of clinical scenarios that are cropping up now. When you studied to become a doctor, obviously, you mentioned that it's not an overnight thing. You do study for quite a few years. What are some of the tips when you obviously, a lot of pharmacists will be fantastic at putting pills in bottles and all the rest of it. It's totally naive. I don't know how this works. But when it comes to dealing with the public, that's a whole new ballgame. So through your experience, when you were trained as a GP, what was some of the advice you were given? Yeah, no, very good question. And it didn't even just come in GP, it came in medical school. So we were taught about communication skills really quite early on because the fundamentals of if you are going to be a doctor or a doctor that I think ends up being a good doctor, you need to sort of be fairly decent in your communication skills. And if you don't, it's going to be quite tricky. So, you know, we used to do sort of scenarios where we have sort of videos, those sort of things, and we're sort of seeing how we're communicating. We would look back on that. And it would be, you know, when you see a patient, you don't start with like a closed question straight away. So someone could be coming in and holding their stomach and you can't just say straight away, how is your stomach? You know, that type of thing, or what's wrong with your stomach? You have to sort of say, you know, how are you feeling today? You know, what brings you in those type of things and let the person communicate. And then obviously, from there, if you're going to ask more specific questions, in theory, you can so that gears your consultation. Now, pharmacies or sort of pharmacists and other clinicians in the pharmacy world, in theory, the traditional training they get may not be so used to that. So those are the sort of things that we need to sort of bounce ideas on where these new services are coming on, and given the right training. And if there's a knowledge gap, it's how can we assist on that? And again, hopefully, someone like myself, that's been through that journey, and others that are within our group can really help, you know, the members of staff that is quite new for. When customers come to see you, and they're talking to you about their health issues, you ask the health questions, but before they come in, how do you prepare yourself to deal with the public? Yes, so that's probably slightly easier from a GP setting because often as a GP, you know, whether it's a reception or someone has put in an online consult, you tend to have an idea what the basics of their medical, we could say medical complaint or medical issue is. So that's sometimes helpful, because if you need to do some quick pre reading, and sometimes you need to do that to just jog the memory of where this consultation might go, it helps. The challenge for pharmacies, you don't you don't always get that. So sometimes a patient may sort of come up to the counter, speak to the counter staff pharmacist is brought in, and it's sort of all quite live. Yeah, and that's that's the difficulty that pharmacists have, but they've always dealt with that. So sometimes, you know, if someone's had, I don't know, a headache or a cough, and you essentially need some over the counter medication, like Neurofen or paracetamol, then pharmacists will in theory deal with that. Obviously, when we get into more complicated type of representations that pharmacies can now do, but it'd be sore throat, ear infection, those type of things. And that's going to be the challenge of how to deal with that, that sort of patient. But, but already where these consultations are geared is there's certain ones that the pharmacies can do. So they're not going to be getting lots of different, weird and wonderful type of conditions. They're going to be certain ones. Yeah, well, one of the key words you mentioned earlier on was communication, how important is it? You've got several businesses spread across the city. How important is it for you to have great communication, not only to the rest of your stores, but also to the rest of your staff? Yeah, no, it's very important. And communication, we live in a time where there's so many ways to communicate, and it's trying to find the right way to communicate. So in an ideal world, I would love to have a conversation with every single individual for sort of 15 minutes, if I could, once a week. But that's quite difficult to do, clearly. So sometimes you have to delegate that responsibility to others. Other time it is, you know, do you send emails, do you put on a WhatsApp, you know, all those type of things. So and you must have received emails where you get an email and there's like 100 attachments, you're probably lost straight away. So it's trying to focus the reading as well, because and the thing with medicine, with pharmacy is that constant reading is always there. So medicine, pharmacy, obviously, you know, like we've been talking about sort of new NHS contracts, so they're constantly evolving. So we have to be careful we don't overload people with too much information, because there's only so much mine and your brains can cope with. So so that's something we try to do and try to find the best way. So whether it is an occasional teams meeting, whether it is using a group WhatsApp, but also not trying to, you know, our phone is our personal thing as well. You don't always be thinking about work. So you've got to find that balance as well. That's the point is that downtime is so important as we've mentioned before, you know, turning your phones off and spending time with your family or or someone you like. And with regards to, you know, customers come up to, is it going to work on an appointment basis? Can people just just come up? Because obviously we're talking about pharmacist time is precious, the same as everybody's. How can a pharmacist assist and also be time aware when dealing with customers and say that there's some of their medical issues? Yeah, and that's a really good question. And I don't quite know the answer to that. That's an evolving thing. So the real benefit of pharmacies is that you can you can go in and generally you should get sorted from that sort of, you know, thing that you've presented to the assistant or the pharmacist, you know, constipation, diarrhea, sore throat, those type of things. So we don't want to lose that because I think then pharmacies sort of lose what they're supposed to be. But clearly, if they are going to be taking more and more clinical things away from things like general practice or even urgent treatment centers, there's going to be a whole volume of type of conditions that are suddenly going to come into pharmacy world. And there's a limit. So there is going to be a limit in how many walk-ins we can have. We often call them walk-ins. So I think it will be a slight hybrid model in time where we'll try to do walk-ins where we can. But obviously, if that gets very busy, then there's probably going to have to be an element of appointment, slight appointment based system, sort of on the day or the following day, those sort of type of things. So those are sort of systems I think will start coming into pharmacies. It's something we're even looking at ourselves to have a slight appointment based system as well so that we can start coping with the volume because what you don't want is to be just turned away there and then and not have an option of when to come back. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think we mentioned the word before, one of the key words through both sides of things is patience. Yes. And being able to sort of say, OK, I will get served at some point. And again, I suppose it comes down to training. So I think a lot of it would be the trust that you can put towards the customers and how they're managed. So if, say, for example, someone's working on the counter, they've been there for five or six weeks. They're not really, you know, they're just finding their feet and stuff like this. What would be some of the tools that you could say to them that, you know, someone approaches and says, I've got this earache. I was told I could see a pharmacy. I've been queuing up for 10 minutes. How do you handle that towards a younger person? Yeah, no, it's again a very valid question. And I go back to that sort of original sort of answer I had where it's a bit of an evolving process because receptionist appointment systems in the GP scenario have been there for many years and most of those surgeries have sort of embedded systems, whereas within pharmacy, some of that is going to be slightly new. Now, they already deal with this. So if traditionally you sort of came in with an issue, headache, those sort of things, that can be escalated up in the pharmacy if it needs to be dealt with someone with a higher skill, who's got that skill and knowledge, but also eventually a pharmacist. So we already have those sort of systems in place. But obviously, when we get into the clinical situations like sore throats or a child with a fever and a sore ear, to just put a block on that consultation there and then can have some safety concerns. So that person at the counter will need to know what they sort of just need to escalate there and then to the pharmacist, even if it means you need to come back in an hour or two because that's when we've got an appointment. So those are things we're sort of working on and we'll have sort of things like crib sheets that we'll have there and then we'll make sure that our sort of staff are trained on knowing who to escalate to. But yeah, that way of dealing with that patient is very new and it's something that we'll have to continually evolve on as well.