Pharmcist vs. GP
Posted: Thu 25 September, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts 3 Comments »Another survey, another news story filed under “No shit, sherlock”.
Today’s gem is that apparently staff in a pharmacy don’t give advice as good as a GP, and gave ‘unsatisfactory’ advice in one-third of the cases. (Which might sound impressive, but let’s not forget that’s only in a sample of 101 pharmacies)
But it’s hardly surprising, is it? At the end of the day, the people selling the drugs in a pharmacy are shop-assistants. That’s it. They’re not health professionals – in fairness, they’re not even health amateurs – and anyone with any common sense wouldn’t treat them as if they were. Asking a pharmacist/ (Edited, as I was wrong to say pharmacists) pharmacy assistant for medical advice (one scenario in this test involved a customer saying they’d had diarrhoea for two weeks since being abroad) is the equivalent of asking a member of staff in Tescos what the best diet is.
As always, if you ask advice from amateurs you should expect to be misinformed. Simple as.
Well, not quite simple as. I agree about assistants who work in pharmacies, but pharmacists are registered with the NHS and pretty well trained. They have a 4 year (MSc level) degree course, then they have to pre-register for a year working in a pharmacy with a registered pharmacist, then they have to sit an exam. So personally, I would say asking the actual pharmacist about what drug to take isn’t a bad approach: just don’t ask the assistant with a Saturday job. They are particularly good at knowing the differences between different drugs, picking up potential interactions between drugs which could be dangerous and so on. However, they don’t have your full medical history as a GP does, nor do they give you a physical examination, so they don’t necessarily have the full picture.
Pharmacists know *much* more about drugs than doctors. It’s just that they hide away from customers most of the time. The problem is that pharmacy assistants like to play god and aren’t trained to pass customers on to the pharmacist when they are at all unsure.
When I was studying in Cambridge I got a Saturday job in Boots. I was allocated to the pharmacy department, and was given no training at all before being let loose on customers. Luckily I’ve always had a great interest in health and a great deal of commoon sense, but, I wasn’t impressed. Sure, that was 20-odd years ago, but it does still happen.
IMHO all pharmacy assistants should be required to have some formal training before being allowed to ‘prescribe’ (some chains do provide it, but not all).
BSAG, I fully agree – pharmacists are trained, but as BW says, they do tend to hide away, and instead most customers deal with the pharmacy assistants, who are untrained and “just” shop assistants.
I’ll change the post slightly, as I did say pharmacists and pharmacy assistant, which isn’t what I meant.