Fintan Moore examines the trade-off between being super-connected by technology, and needing some personal space
Technology has been great for pharmacy in multiple ways, despite its failings and foibles. Any pharmacists old enough to remember hand-writing labels based on the contents of indexed paper patient files are probably more forgiving of dot matrix printers than pharmacists like myself, who arrived into the profession after computerisation had eased some of the drudgery. The evolution of the Internet and emails transformed processes such as ordering, which used to be done over the phone by reading the list of what was needed to a telesales person in the wholesaler’s office. The most profound change in a lot of ways has been the universal adoption of mobile phones, especially smartphones. People are now potentially contactable every hour of every day, which in a workplace has both upsides and downsides.
It’s clearly a positive that anybody working in the pharmacy, either employer or employee, can be sent
a text when they’re off to check on an issue such as whether or not they ordered in an item, or to clarify a message they left, etc. It goes without saying that when people are off, they should be left alone as much as possible, but a bit of give-and-take is reasonable — the same principle applies if somebody is in work and needs to take a personal call regarding something that needs a prompt answer.
The dividing line of what’s reasonable in either direction can get blurred at times, but in general, the balance works. Interestingly, in my opinion, the people most at risk of getting the balance wrong in their own lives are the pharmacists, who voluntarily don’t switch off from work.
As an employer, I’ve gradually learned a bit about managing time off. Years ago, if I was on a two-week holiday, I used to phone work midway through to ‘check on everything’, which in hindsight was really dumb. Inevitably, I’d be given a list of messages that had been left for me, all of which could have waited until I returned, because if they were urgent my staff would have called me, but they were now in my headspace. Nowadays, I assume all is fine, and that somebody will ring me if anything urgent crops up, but otherwise, I can forget about the pharmacy and relax. But forgetting isn’t as easy as it used to be because of the smartphone.
It used to be simple to stay away from emails back in the days when you had to find a computer to access them, but now they’re instantly available with one click on a phone, so I find it hard not to check them. In fairness, there are two schools of thought on this — some people prefer to keep checking emails regularly so that they don’t have a couple of hundred of them waiting on their return. But at least you need to click into emails to see them, and in terms of intrusion into time off, a bigger problem can be pharmacy WhatsApp groups because the messages just pop up.
Even when you mute the groups as I do, you still see that messages have come in, and it’s hard not to read what’s going on. They also arrive at all hours because of the ‘larks’ posting at dawn (something wrong with those people!) and the ‘owls’ posting half the night. So while sitting in a café in Paris or having an outdoor breakfast in Greece, you get sucked into reading about the latest crap emanating from the HSE or the DoH.
I may never master it, but ignoring WhatsApp groups when I should be relaxing is now a goal.
An interesting added benefit of the vaccine is that it provides a level of protection against dementia
Failure to communicate
Moving on from the problems of excessive contactability, a real bug-bear in work is that small cohort of GPs, hospital doctors and consultants who routinely fail to respond to communication.
To my mind, a lot of the reason it’s so irritating is that it’s so unnecessary. Despite it not being a proper form of electronic prescribing, Healthmail is nevertheless beautifully simple. We can send messages and see them in the Sent folder, and we can receive messages and see them in the Inbox folder. So, what exactly is going wrong for the prescribers who can’t operate the Inbox?
Most of the times when I email a query, all I need is a simple Yes/No answer, which will impact minimally on their time. If the query is slightly more complicated, then it’s usually an issue that deserves their attention. But whatever happens, they will ultimately need to reply, whether to the Healthmail, or to the browned-off patient that gets the problem bounced back to them when I give up. The fastest, simplest, most efficient way for the prescriber to handle it is to just open the Inbox, see what they need to do, channel their inner Nike and ‘Just Do It’. Preferably, today.
Shingles vaccine and dementia
Shingles can vary in severity, from being mild with a quick recovery, to being horribly itchy and painful with long-term neuralgia. The risk of getting it increases with age, so the shingles vaccine is worth having for anyone over 60. The cost is somewhat high, but the protection it gives lasts about 12 years, so the cost per year of the protection is low enough to justify it.
I’m not 60 yet, but it’s getting close enough, so I intend to get the vaccine now rather than wait, because I’d feel a bit stupid if I got shingles at 59. Pharmacists are allowed to administer it, which makes it convenient to get.
An interesting added benefit of the vaccine is that it provides a level of protection against dementia. Studies have found a 20 per cent reduced risk of a dementia diagnosis in people vaccinated versus those unvaccinated. The theory is that vaccination lessens the likelihood of the virus leading to the formation of dementia-causing proteins in the brain.
Whatever about shingles, anything that improves the odds of avoiding dementia is worth a shot, literally!
Fintan Moore graduated as a pharmacist in 1990 from TCD and currently runs a pharmacy in Clondalkin. His email address is: greenparkpharmacy @gmail.com.
