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Pharmacy Assistants Have Great Potential To Champion Public Health

Pharmacy assistants have the opportunity to contribute markedly to various public health agenda programmes. So is it now not time to develop their roles?

The public health role of community pharmacists has been at the forefront of the agenda to promote their position within the healthcare system of late. The void in the repository of pharmacists’ traditional skills (activities that are product- and task-oriented such as compounding, counting of loose tablets, etc), largely attributed to technological innovations (eg, pre-packaged medicines), has been largely subsumed by an advisory role.

Under the current contract, community pharmacists are as likely as not to spend a proportion of their working activity engaged in attempts to promote and protect the public’s health (eg, smoking cessation advice, weight loss and sexual health programmes) as they are with dispensing medicines — doubtless facilitated by the burgeoning growth of “consultation areas” in pharmacies.

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Extract taken from PJ Online