Being a pharmacist isn’t the best job for a Christmas-phobic person, writes Fintan Moore
It might be a character defect of mine, but I’ve never been great at getting enthusiastic about anything compulsory — even if it’s something that should be ‘fun’. I think that’s the main reason why I’m always lukewarm at best about Christmas — although I once got a gift of an advent calendar with a different whiskey for each day, and that eased the pain a bit.
My problem with Christmas is that there’s no opt-out, whereas you can dodge or ignore all the other annual events – regardless of whether they celebrate Christian gods like the Easter Bunny, pagan spirits during Halloween, or 40-proof spirits on Paddy’s Day.
Sadly, being a community pharmacist isn’t the best job for a Christmas-phobic. The rot sets in from as early as mid-summer, when companies run tradeshows for Christmas gift orders, and reps drop in catalogues or start to spam my inbox.
Things go downhill even more from October, when the stock actually arrives and the shop gets rearranged to make room for it all. After that you have to cross your fingers that enough of it will sell at a high enough margin to compensate for what will get shoplifted or be left sitting there unsold in January.
People who work with me tend to refer to Christmas as ‘the C word’, but in recent years I now also have to contend with ‘the F word’ as the flu vaccination season rolls in. Granted, I don’t have to do flu vaccinations and I already don’t do Covid vaccinations because of the workload involved. I could similarly choose to skip flu vaccinations but my perception is that patients now see them as a standard part of pharmacy care, so I feel stuck with sticking people.
In fairness, doing the vaccinations themselves tends to be alright. The parts I hate are the training in advance of the flu season, and the paperwork and recording for each injection. The worst vaccinations have generally involved children having meltdowns and refusing the nasal spray — but as more and more children get done en masse by pharmacists going into schools, I’m thankfully seeing fewer demonic possessions.
Nevertheless, I view the start of September with about as much enthusiasm as the average back-to- school pupil facing a double Irish class.
Fazed by getting un-phased
The whole issue of phased dispensing with or without blister-packing has been a thorny topic for the Health Service Executive (HSE) for a long time. I never had many patients getting phased prescriptions but some pharmacies did, until the HSE tightened up the eligibility criteria a few years ago.
I only ever do phased dispensing if there is a clear justification for it, consequently I have rarely had applications refused, apart from a couple of baffling refusals involving elderly patients who were on multiple items. The recent agreement between the Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) and the HSE includes further restrictions on phased dispensing, which I think is short-sighted on the part of the HSE.
I reckon that, on average, every pharmacy in the country has at least one patient, usually elderly, on several medications daily who is coping with their regimen only because of phased dispensing with the medication having been blister-packed.
I am aware of the distinction between phasing and blister-packing — some patients need blister-packing without phasing, so they pay for the service privately. Some need phasing without blister-packing. And some need both for the simple reason that it’s unsafe for them to have more than one blister-pack at a time because they get confused about which they should be using.
In future when patients like these are no longer eligible for phased approval, they will struggle to manage with regular monthly dispensing, and inevitably there will be mishaps and hospitalisations. One patient night in hospital costs the HSE about €2,000,
The worst vaccinations have generally involved children having meltdowns
and refusing the nasal spray
so the maths very quickly shows that the short-term savings from the new restrictions on phasing will cost the HSE a multiple of that in the long-term.
Coke – the war is over
Personally, I don’t want cocaine so I don’t take it, and even if it was legal, I still wouldn’t want it. The same with with some legal activities — I don’t want to race motorbikes, show-jump horses, climb high mountains, scuba- dive in caves, or go hang-gliding.
Unlike me, there are lots of people who enjoy cocaine, and lots of people who enjoy high-risk sports. For some reason, governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars trying to stop cocaine use, but not to stop other ways in which people can choose to dice with death and injury.
Despite the trillions spent to ‘combat’ drugs, the outcome has been that
the producers have earned billions of dollars, and the popularity of recreational drugs continues to grow regardless of education or enforcement.
If you want cocaine in any town in Ireland, you can get it as fast as a pizza. Prohibition has failed, so there is no moral or practical justification for the continued ‘war on drugs’.
The reality is that the bad guys have already won and the existing, failed strategy only makes them richer.
Maybe the status quo is the lesser evil, but it is about time we at least did a cost-benefit analysis on the legalisation of cocaine and taxing its sales to help fund healthcare and addiction services for the users with problems.
Fintan Moore graduated as a pharmacist in 1990 from TCD and currently runs a pharmacy in Clondalkin. His email address is: greenparkpharmacy @gmail.com.
