By Alexander Humphries*

I don’t say this enough, but I love community pharmacy. OK, perhaps not quite as much when it is as tough as it has been recently, but for me it is all about people.

More professionally rewarding for me by far than any amount of clinical interventions or small day-to-day wins is when you can make a real difference to someone’s life. A few meaningful moments make all the other rubbish pale away – and so it has been for me of late.

My first story concerns a patient who died recently. The patient, who I shall call Bill, hadn’t been into the pharmacy for years because he had been increasingly frail and eventually became housebound. However, we continued to look after his needs at a distance - phone calls, delivery service, and regular contact with his family and carers. Unlike a distance selling pharmacy, we know our patients well; they are not just a nomination or a series of items to be dispensed.

When Bill started to have difficulty swallowing after a stroke, we managed to convert most of his medicines to liquids and transdermal pain relief, which kept him comfortable and stable for a long time. During his final illness we were liaising almost daily with the family, hospital and GP practice to make sure that we kept him safe with his medicines.

Immediately after he died his family came to thank us for looking after him, telling us what a difference it made as they didn’t live nearby and always knew they could phone us to help him. They even made a special point of mentioning the pharmacy in the notice in the local paper.

This story is actually totally unremarkable to anyone who works in a community pharmacy, precisely because it is the sort of thing which happens on a daily basis. We don’t think it is anything special, but the extra care and attention that people receive, especially at the most difficult times in their lives, can make a tremendous difference to patients and their families.

Even though we were technically providing services ‘remotely’ for Bill, there is no way an internet pharmacy could have matched the personal service we were able to provide – just as the Royal Mail can’t match the knowledge of pharmacy delivery drivers either.

Care and compassion

Indeed, we probably don’t make enough of our brilliant delivery drivers, who are often the only people that some isolated elderly patients see in a day.

But it is the small acts of kindness in pharmacy that make the difference to the people we all care for. I know of one pharmacist who, when dropping a medicine off for a patient, learnt that the patient was really anxious because she was being investigated for a potential cancer.

When the patient explained she didn’t know how she was getting to the appointment, the pharmacist drove her to the hospital on his day off and sat with her while she was having her tests. The patient later told the pharmacist that it had meant a lot to her that someone cared and took time out of their day to help.

Another regular, Barbara, has just been diagnosed with early-stage dementia. Her husband Phillip had grown anxious about his ability to cope with her medicines. He came in and a colleague sat down with Phillip and really listened to his needs. She suggested a MDS and, once it was explained how it would help him, he agreed.

After the first month, Phillip dropped a card and some biscuits in to the pharmacy to say ‘thank you’. The MDS pack had transformed his daily routine and had taken some of the pressure off him. The staff were really proud of themselves because of the way they had helped as a team, identifying not only a problem, but also a solution and then implementing it.

Community centre

Sometimes I think I work in more of a community centre than a community pharmacy when I overhear some of the random conversations between customers and staff. The burden of looking after older people falls disproportionately on this pharmacy because of the demographics of our area

Another older lady, Mona, who has dementia, is off on holiday shortly. She has been in to see me every day for the past fortnight to tell me she is going away and to arrange her medicines while she is away. I don’t think she is the only one looking forward to the break!

All of this good work is under threat from the pharmacy cuts but, for now, let us celebrate the difference that community pharmacy makes to people’s everyday lives. It’s magnificent.

Pen name of a practising community pharmacist. Alexander Humphries’ views are not necessarily those of Pharmacy Magazine. What recent acts of kindness makes you proud of your pharmacy?  Email pm@1530.com

The pharmacist drove the patient to the hospital on his day off