Assistant training key to retaining schedules

Simone Roberts

Professor Charlie Benrimoj from the University of Sydney urged pharmacists at the 33rd PSA Pharmacy Refresher Course in Rio de Janeiro last fortnight to invest in training for their pharmacy assistants, or risk losing products to supermarkets.

"If anybody is going to kill OTC in pharmacy it's that group," Prof Benrimoj said. "We have lots of evidence that there are pockets of problems in this area."

According to data obtained in the pseudo-patient program run by the Quality Care Pharmacy Program Support Centre, more than a quarter of pharmacy assistants fail to ask questions or provide advice to customers requesting a specific product.

"If someone comes in with a direct product request and the pharmacy assistant deals with it, at least 25 per cent of the time they just give the customer the price. That's it. How different is that to somebody walking into a supermarket and grabbing something off the shelf? When we start showing this sort of data to government, if you lot don't do something about it, we're in trouble. The key message is that you've got to invest in your pharmacy assistants to get them to perform well."

Prof Benrimoj said it was not enough to rely on education provided by manufacturers, because it was having little or no effect.

As of 1 March 2008, the training of all pharmacy staff who handle S2/S3 medicines became a mandatory part of the Quality Care Pharmacy Program (QCPP) second edition.

"That's not there by pure chance. That's there because all the evidence says that that is the major risk area. Please, please train your pharmacy assistants," Prof Benrimoj said.

Prof Benrimoj said that without a much more significant investment in training, pharmacy could potentially lose this valuable group of drugs, worth about a billion dollars in terms of sales and approximately 10-15 per cent of turnover in most Australian pharmacies.

"Go back to your pharmacies and spend some money training these people. If you don't spend some money training these people, you're potentially going to lose 15 -20 per cent of your business," he said.

"At the end of the day you can't fool all the people all the time. Eventually we are going to have a report that says 'this is not good enough' and we are going to lose products. We are in a very privileged position, both professionally and economically in Australia. We are one of the few countries that has retained S3 and S2 products. Do you want to give that privileged position away?"