The roles of the pharmacist and the pharmacy team continue to evolve. And moving away from the dispensing model towards patient-centred services requires a different approach for everyone.

All too often, patients are invisible stakeholders in our healthcare system. In pharmacy, the traditional provider-centric healthcare model focuses on dispensing, with the pharmacist as the medicines expert and the patient a passive recipient. However, patients are the experts in their own lives. Pharmacy consultations with patients must help to empower people to better manage their conditions.

A patient is empowered when they are provided with sufficient knowledge to make informed decisions, given adequate control and resources to implement their choices, and armed with the necessary experience to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of any steps taken in the management and treatment of their condition.

Engagement

A number of studies have shown that patients do not always view community pharmacies as providers of a service. Rather, it could be seen that the consumer enters a pharmacy as part of their patient-doctor relationship. This has led the consumer to:

• Commoditise the community pharmacy service (e.g. when paying a fee for a prescription medicine)
• Focus on the speed with which medications are dispensed
• Consider the convenience of the pharmacy location (e.g. 24-hour accessibility, free car parking)
• View the community pharmacy as a retail outlet for medicines and not as a provider of patient services.

For the delivery of effective patient-centred care services in pharmacy, the pharmacist must redefine their relationship with patients. Redefining the patient-pharmacist relationship is viewed as critical to the provision of any service, and enhanced patient engagement, communication and consultation skills are all central to this.

Good provider-patient relationships enable patients to:

• Ask questions
• Share decisions with providers
• Reach agreement with providers about the problem and the need for follow-up.

To grow your ‘social authority’ as a healthcare professional, it is important that you are able to use effective communication and consultation skills to probe patients’ attitudes toward medication use, subjective perceptions of health or illness, and fears and concerns about therapy, etc.

Pharmacists must take the initiative to engage more patients in professional discussion rather than speaking only with those who ask for advice.

Consultation skills

The ability of the pharmacist and other staff to enhance their consultation skills is central to a patient-centred service and collaborative approach.

Anyone who is involved in giving advice to patients and customers must be able to communicate effectively, gain trust and engage in a two-way discussion about the patient’s condition and treatments. Research suggests that this approach means that patients are more likely to be adherent to and satisfied with their medication regime.¹

In addition, pharmacists are likely to enjoy greater job satisfaction by promoting a sense of professional autonomy and empowerment and utilising key professional skills through working this way. A patient-centred service approach can also help the pharmacy to enhance customer loyalty and differentiate itself from competitors.

Developing a strong set of consultation skills will enable you and your team to encourage patients to consider outcomes, ask questions and clarify preferences. Better consultations focus less on a single problem and solution and are more interactive in nature. This type of interaction is based on shared expertise between the health professional and the patient, and allows for more informed decisions to be made.