Viewpoints

Three community pharmacy professionals share their top tips on what makes pharmacists successful managers.

Today’s pharmacist is much more than a healthcare professional who oversees the distribution of drugs. Pharmacists can be and often are the patient’s first-line healthcare educator and risk manager.

Confronted by overwhelming workplace challenges, pharmacists sometimes forget they have options. It's time to step outside the limits of habitual thinking and take a look around.

Sterile compounders have voluntarily undertaken several upgrades to their processes and products. The results benefit patients, pharmacists, and the profession overall.

When people are injured by pharmacy mistakes, it is a public safety issue. Where are the state boards of pharmacy?

If you're a pharmacist looking for another route to success, satisfaction, and reward, start here.

When multiple factors are involved, the issues may not be as clear-cut as you think.

It can take years to establish the safety and efficacy of new drug therapies. What should we do in the meantime?

If you don't know what you want in a manager, you're far more likely to end up unsatisfied. Better give it some thought.

Over the course of a career, errors are inevitable. For pharmacists, who never forget that lives are at stake, the prospect is chilling. Yet close calls still happen. This was one.

What if pharmacies give a lockbox to every patient taking a controlled medication? This project aims to find out.

What will you do when you find yourself in a job you love, working for an inadequate manager?

Two agendas interfere with the delivery of appropriate healthcare services by pharmacists and physicians, and patients take it in the neck.

Looking for that first pharmacy job? Here are a few things to keep in mind.

How many good managers have you had? Same for Mike Lahr. In this article, he tells you why.

When pharmacists achieve provider status, patients will benefit, payers will save on costs, and providers will get an assist. So what's holding things up?

Here's what a concerned corporation might do to support employee empowerment and reward loyalty to the company.

The new-gen treatments for Hep C can make the illness go away, but their extreme price tags make insurance co-pays unaffordable, and many patients just stay sick.

What if P&T committees choose drugs on the basis of bias-prone info? What part is played when corporate funding supports academic research? And what can pharmacists do about it?

Pharmacists swear an oath to do no harm. But what about patients? Should they be responsible for their behavior toward us?

Pharmacists who lose touch with the core of their professional identities abandon much more than just activities and functions.

The new CPE series that begins this month will focus on treatment and management of respiratory diseases.

This blackbird is a good omen.

A word from the Honest Apothecary: Guest columnist Jason Poquette spells out what transitions of care actually involve.

Cost of treatment often forces aging patients on limited incomes to choose between paying for medications or for food and rent.

The urge to amass wealth is a great motivator in the making and selling of commodities. But for delivery of healthcare services? Maybe not so much.

Three of the most heavily invested players in the pharmaceutical industry are at odds. Pharma manufacturers need to recoup R&D costs and demonstrate accountability to leadership and shareholders, keeping drug prices as high as possible before their patents expire. PBMs are responsible for driving down costs for their plan sponsors, frequently engaging in hard negotiations with manufacturers. Pharmacists are often afterthoughts to the conversation, even though they are arguably the healthcare providers with more ability to influence patient outcomes and maximize the value of high-cost medication therapies than any other member of the care continuum.

A pharmacy student and an industry professional offer two very different takes on the issues and what to do about them.