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The vast majority of pharmacists actually want to be detailed by prescription and over-the-counter drug companies, 65 percent in all—with just one caveat: Never on a Monday.

In general, pharmacists are looking for four essential things from the drug reps that call on them:

• Information about new products.
• Demonstrations of differences between medicines and relative effectiveness.
• Helpful information they can give to their patients in clear and easy to understand language—and lots of pictures.
• Information about patient assistance programs.

Indeed, these views were echoed by every pharmacist on the Drug Store News live panel, they
all want to be called on by drug reps. But like so many things, it's all about timing.

"How come drug reps don't work Tuesday to Saturday when I have time to talk to them?" one pharmacist asked. "I don't have time to talk to them on Monday. Or on the day after a 3-day weekend: I barely have time to talk to my customers on a Monday."

"[It] seems like they all come in at the same time; like it's 'quota time' or something," noted another. "Like everybody has to come in and get their face time with the pharmacist."

Still, he wouldn't necessarily tell them to stop calling on him either. "But I always find that if I give one of these people the time of day, I walk away with some sort of information that I can use."

In terms of what day is best, pharmacists told Drug Store News the two best days are Wednesday (33.8 percent) and Thursday (18.2 percent). In general, panelists agreed that the midafternoon, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., after the morning and noon rush but before the five o'clock whistle and the next crush of customers, is ideal. Since no time is ever a good time, most agreed that these visits should last no more than five to 10 minutes. "Five minutes, when you think about it, just talking?"

"That's longer than I spend with any one customer at a time. It doesn't sound like a long time, but when you're in a busy pharmacy and you spend five minutes just sitting down and talking to anyone, that's a long time—it's like an hour."

"I could be spending that time with customers," agreed another.

The consensus was that these visits should probably last about five minutes.

Almost without exception every pharmacist on the panel agreed that providing helpful and actionable patient information should be the prevailing topic of conversation during these detailing sessions. More than half want information on patient assistance programs, a major priority for pharmacists on the panel who see the ability to help make the cost of therapy affordable for their patients as a major component of customer satisfaction.

"I am in a low-income neighborhood and patient assistance programs are very valuable to me in terms of getting my customers the medical care they need," one pharmacist stated.

Another area pharmacists would like to learn more about from manufacturer reps is the disease states that relate to the drugs they are promoting so that pharmacists can provide important information about lifestyle management, diet, etc., a growing area of focus during patient consultations. It's an area that pharmacists on the panel agreed would take on increased importance in the years to come as Medication Therapy Management programs evolve and become more fully implemented.

One thing pharmacists think suppliers can help them with is keeping it simple: easy-to-retrieve patient information cards they can stack right in the same place they store the drug so that they can tear away a sheet each time they fill the script; 3x5 drug information cards that can be kept in a central location; and plenty of pictures—the more visual the patient materials, the better. "I have customers in my store that can't read a box of cough syrup," noted one pharmacist who works in a community with a large immigrant population. "You have to be able to go out into the aisles and help them, and in my neighborhood we are dealing with some people for whom English is not only not their first language, it's not even their second or third language."

"Here in California our ballots are printed in 21 different languages—one-third of the state is now Hispanic," noted a pharmacist from Bakersfield.

"They're [the ballots] even printed in Chinese, here in Boston," quipped another.

"I'm in Indiana and I deal with a large Hispanic population," another said. "It's not just isolated to the two coasts and the border states anymore."