E-DRUG: Motivating Pharmacists for Enhanced Contribution in Healthcare(6)
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Dear e-druggers,
At the risk of "preaching down" to my professional colleagues, I take the liberty to reiterate the saying of Mahtma Gandhi that "We must be the change we want to see in the world". Although this implies altruism, it simply means that we need not wait for external momentum to get going. We have to make a holisitic assessment of the professional environment we are in and actively engage in it to integrate and connect across professional disciplines.
I know that the issue of whose expertise counts in the healthcare team is real and not all members can be treated equally, yet each member is vital to the team. Every team has a leader and the healthcare team has the physician as the one primarily responsible for the patient. The pharmacist has to build bridges, but in order to do that, he/she has to get to the river where the bridge is needed! The medicines that are our tools of trade need to be available for us to have a basis for further contributions to patient care and build confidence in the healthcare team.
There is within the pharmacist tremendous intellectual potential that is untapped primarily due to professional boundaries that have historically created work heirarchies and the diversion of firefighting drug supply issues. The challenge is for the pharmacist to deliberately open up new frontiers of communication and increase their engagement and participation in critical patient care aspects where they cannot be dispensed with. The pharmacist has to be willing to tolerate the dynamic stresses during the transitional phase in order to gel into the team. We ought not to be as helpless as we sound. There ends my sermon.
Atieno Ojoo (from Kenya)
Boston University School of Public Health
atisojoo@yahoo.co.uk