A patient in every box

Abstract

During a recent symposium on drug shortages, a community pharmacist colleague pleaded for more information from his industrial pharmacist colleagues. “We have to face the patients, and explain to the patients why their medicine is not available”, he said. He was right, of course, but the point is another, more fundamental one. Down at the coalface of pharmacist–patient interaction, a single box is dispensed to a single patient, a very personal interaction at the core of our profession that is sometimes denied to industrial pharmacists. This is not to diminish for a single moment industrial pharmacists’ constant commitment to quality, safety and efficacy of medicinal products, but our daily practice is centred around batch releases, market authorisations, pharmacovigilance, quality assurance – all of which are certainly a commitment as pharmacists to patients. However, it takes a moment of deliberate pause to stop and try to visualise the individual patient to whom the single box of medicine is destined, and, even then, how does one valorise the significance of that box of medicines to that patient, what it means to him or her to be able to get through the day with that much less pain, or to have the hope of another day of life without the fear of remission?