Fintan Moore on the nationalisation of our income streams
As healthcare professionals, we are in a very trusted position when it comes to how we operate and are quite rightly expected to work legally and ethically, but it’s also essential that we work profitably. At the end of the day, we all need money to keep the world going around. As a general rule, we’re lucky enough in our line of business that if we take care of our patients, then the money will take care of itself but like a lot of general rules, it comes with a few specific caveats. Like any other retailers, we need to buy low and sell high, which is often easier said than done on both sides of the equation.
Regular shortages of medication frequently limit our options on how well we buy, and because
the HSE is our main customer, we have no control over what we sell most medication for. In recent years, there has been a creeping nationalisation of our income streams as the DPS threshold has been steadily reduced, and now the pricing of all our contraception and HRT business is also under State control.
For whatever private prescription business still remains, it has never been easier for patients to ‘compare the market’, so price competition will remain keen. Having said all of that, it’s still important to set prices at a level that respects the associated professional time and input.
Personally, I regard my time and that of my employees as a valuable commodity. We have a charge for blister-packing medicines to reflect the time required to prepare them, and I genuinely struggle to fathom why any pharmacy would do them for free. I accept that there can be local competitive pressures if ‘the place down the road’ does them for nothing, but it’s equally likely that they’re only doing them for nothing because you are. If one pharmacy introduces a charge, the other will probably follow suit. Even some of the chains that used to trumpet about doing various free services are steadily rolling in fees to cope with the costs involved.
At the risk of sounding like I’m contradicting myself, I will also throw money at a problem if it saves me time and effort. If there’s a minor shortfall between what the HSE pays for something and the price I have to pay for it, then I’ll take the hit and move on, rather than waste several minutes debating it with the patient. In a perfect world, this shouldn’t happen but Utopia hasn’t arrived yet. I also believe in buying more equipment if it will regularly save even a few seconds. I changed an otherwise perfect Kodak scanner to a Brother because the Kodak
Maybe over the years pharmacists hyper-develop the part of the brain that relates to guesswork
had a stupid power-saving mode, which it took about 15 seconds to wake up from. Even minor things can make a difference — if you regularly have to cross the dispensary to use a stapler, then you probably need to buy another stapler. At the very least, time is money — but it’s actually a lot more valuable.
Local loop
Speaking of saving time, a very useful way to do that is to set up all your local or neighbouring pharmacies as a group on Healthmail, assuming of course that they’re all happy to be included. It takes a little bit of time to get all the various Healthmail addresses and to add them in, but the payback in terms of time saved makes it very worthwhile.
If you’re ever stuck for an item because your order hasn’t arrived or because a hospital has done a Friday-evening special and released a patient on some obscure medication, then you can canvass the neighbourhood with a single email rather than spending the time on the phone. An additional benefit is that it can offer a quick and easy way to circulate a warning regarding forged scripts or known shoplifters circulating in the area.
Chairman of the board game
When it comes to family board games, I’m usually fairly average. I’m reasonably good at Scrabble, and a bit hit-and-miss with Pictionary. However, we recently had a new addition to the games collection, which is a game called Concept, in which one person has to point to a selection of various pictures and symbols as clues to help the others guess the answer, which can be almost anything, such as a person, book, place or even a phrase.
As an example, for Dora the Explorer, the pictures and symbols pointed to were the ones for humans, small animals, and aeroplanes to indicate that a young person travelled with animals. So far, I’ve won every game we’ve played, and this might be just beginner’s luck, but I’m wondering if it’s because I spend all day in work figuring out what people mean.
Patients order medication with vague descriptions of what they need, doctors write vague prescriptions, and customers present with vague symptoms of mystery ailments, so maybe over the years pharmacists hyper- develop the part of the brain that relates to guesswork. It’s not much of a superpower, but I’ll take it.
Fintan Moore graduated as a pharmacist in 1990 from TCD and currently runs a pharmacy in Clondalkin. His email address is: greenparkpharmacy @gmail.com.
