We lost a friend on Friday. Steve French was a hard working, good human being from Ripley in my home state of West Virginia. He managed a farm, took care of his family, and together with his wife and daughter, was raising two nephews because he loved them and it was the right thing to do.
Steve had an ache in his leg that should have been seen by a doctor. He died of a likely heart attack. Any pharmacist, nurse, or physician who talked with him would probably have insisted he get checked out. But no one had a chance to offer that advice. He didn’t have health insurance and didn’t want to burden anyone, so he just lived with the pain.
His family and friends will miss him, but we need to learn from his death. Let’s recommit to building a collaborative system that assures hard workers like Steve that they will have a home in our health care system. Let’s be more accessible as pharmacists and make it obvious so people don’t wonder any more whether it’s OK to bother the pharmacist who looks too busy. Let’s not let the lessons of Steve’s death go unheeded.
The evil of our health care system: no insurance means death sentence.
I will make sure that I will be visible and available for my patients later when I practice as a pharmacist. However, I will also need some support for this.
Dear all retail pharmacy stores:
Please promote or develop better system that pharmacists can have more direct patient interaction. I dropped by pharmacy stores in Singapore, France, Italy, UK, and South Korea while I am traveling in these countries, and all pharmacists in these countries are directly contacting with their patients regarding to medication or any other health issues as soon as patients walk into the stores. How about us? We hardly see any pharmacists to talk because they are too busy processing the prescriptions behind the pharmacy counter.
In addition, the patient can obtain common antibiotics or digestive medicine directly from the pharmacists in the above countries after consulting the pharmacist. We do not need to go to hospital for everything. And you know we go to see doctors for EVERYTHING because our system is set up that way!
Although I understand that more prescription filling is directly related to the store’s profit, this may be a short-coming.
However, when you put the direct patient service by competent pharmacists beyond selling drugs, your pharmacy stores will have more patients to get the service, and then this will lead to more profit at the end.
Perhaps, retail stores should talk to our government to promore better access to common drugs by our patients (e.g. drugs that prescriptions are not required but that pharmacist consultation is necessary). Well, again you can get more profit out of this promotion, so think hard about this.
One more thing, buying reasonably priced common drugs should not require any health insurance! The method we have of requiring doctors’ consultation to get prescriptions for these common drugs adds large overhead cost for our health care system since this requires the health insurance.
And you know what? Pharmacists can even follow up with the patients on how the drug treatment is progressing, of course, no health insurance is necessary because it is all included in that drug price.
Helen Roh
Pharmacy student
University of California, San Francisco