Patient advocate

The pharmacy owner had an interesting chat with a long standing regular customer this week.

She’s on warfarin tablets and told him that she had had the brilliant idea of him using his counselling room to start taking blood samples from patients on warfarin to save them trailing to the local hospital and waiting hours for this to be done.

This did make us smile, and it took a little bit of explaining that a number of pharmacies are already successfully providing this service around the country and that it would ultimately be the decision of the local PCT if we were to start providing this type of service or not.

However it’s great that patients are obviously beginning to view community pharmacies as not just places where they buy nappies and get their prescriptions dispensed.

And if we do decide to pursue this avenue, it’s great that we already have our patient advocate for the service.