From an extensive report on CBC. While it is a general article, it is interesting to see how big pharmacy chains are transforming into your local corner drug pusher. worth reading.
Internal emails from top Canadian chain drugstores show the pressures that pharmacists say they get from companies to push billable services in order to boost revenue. The emails were shared with CBC’s Marketplace by pharmacists who are speaking out about increasing business pressures to perform extra services that can be billed to patients or to provincial governments. These services include medication reviews, flu shots, smoking cessation programs and food intolerance testing kits.
“I think as a pharmacist, it’s embarrassing,” Derek Jorgenson, a pharmacist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, told Marketplace co-host Erica Johnson. “I think it makes you feel like you're not a health professional. It makes you feel like a door-to-door salesman or a used car salesman,” he said. “We as pharmacists didn't go into this profession to do that.”
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The pharmacists approached Marketplace after the initial investigation to show how corporate pressures negatively affect their work.
“What we're becoming is salesmen,” one former Rexall pharmacist told Marketplace. Marketplace agreed to protect the identity of the pharmacists who spoke out because they fear retribution in the industry. “They want us to sell med checks, flu shots, Hemocode tests, A1C tests, things that don't cost the store anything, but make money for the store,” she said. The pharmacists shared internal emails from management that discuss daily targets for medication reviews.
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