Day by Day

It’s common these days to interact with healthcare professionals via digital technologies. We phone our GP’s receptionist or use a patient portal to make an appointment with a doctor. And we phone the pharmacist to find out if our prescription has been filled and is ready for collection, or we get a text to tell us that our meds are ready. Or we call the pharmacist to ask for advice or additional information about our medicines. Email has become, for many, just another way of getting in touch with doctors, nurses and pharmacists. Many healthcare services have a social media presence as well, such as a Facebook page, for discussions and enquiries.

Or do they?

The truth is, we can make all the assumptions we want, but no-one really knows which digital tools are used in community pharmacies (i.e. not hospital pharmacies). Although there are decades’ worth of literature on research about doctors and nurses using these tools, the literature is limited when it comes to community pharmacists’ use of digital technologies. And less research has been done on this topic from the consumer’s perspective.

Therefore, we are now researching how pharmacists use video, phone, email and messaging to communicate with their customers and to provide healthcare services. We have completed the data collection about general practice (GPs, practice nurses and nurse practitioners and their consumers). While we analyse the data and write it up for publication for you to see the results, we’ve started the pharmacy telehealth project. Please join me in welcoming to our research team two pharmacists from the Ministry of Health, William Allan and Harry Zheng, and from the Pharmaceutical Society of New Zealand, Chloe Campbell.

What do we want from you?

If you’re living in New Zealand and you’re a pharmacist, intern pharmacist or pharmacy technician working in a community pharmacy in New Zealand, please complete this survey. We need at least 200 complete responses (in other words, if you’re interrupted please come back to the survey and complete it as soon as possible) to get a strong analysis.

Follow this link to complete the survey. Please spread the word among your colleagues so that we can get as many responses as possible before Christmas.

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