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A Special Report:
Find Out What Pharmacists And Customers Are Telling You.

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Pharmacists, on average, receive about 2.4 days a year of training, which more often than not focuses on areas such as accredited continuing education (according to 80.1 percent of respondents), store policies and procedures (75.7 percent) and computer systems training (69.9 percent) versus people (46.1 percent) or product (48.1 percent) training.

But it’s not all just about explaining the product to the patient—in many cases the patient isn’t the actual customer. “About 40 percent of the time the person picking up the prescription is not the patient,” one pharmacist noted. “So in many cases you need additional literature to send back home to the patient.”

More than 95 percent of pharmacists say that receiving product-specific, patient-counseling literature from manufacturers is either an important or a very important part of their ability to provide effective patient counseling.

Some areas in which pharmacists on the panel would like to see more support from both the companies they work for, as well as the supplier community, include education about vitamins, supplements and nutritionals; core OTC health care categories; home health care; diagnostics; and pediatric dosing information for cough/cold, anti-gas, antacid, pain relief and other common remedies. In general, many pharmacists say they want to see more drugdrug interaction information, product brochures, customer handouts, pharmacist tips sheets and other printed materials from product manufacturers to help with patient counseling on products, key disease states and therapeutic conditions. “Every time I turn around, there is something new on the shelf,” noted one pharmacist. “And I’m not getting the memo on what it is and what it’s used for.”

And more than 74 percent of pharmacists would like to receive in-store visits from pharmaceutical and OTC manufacturer sales reps and to get more of this kind of product support from the supplier community. “Instead of coming into the store and giving me pens and pads, how about bringing me something I can use,” said one pharmacist.

At least one pharmacist on the panel noted that he would like to see more of a focus on product training as part of the standard pharmacy school curriculum. “There are two parts to the equation here,” he said, “you have current pharmacists and ‘soon-to-be’ pharmacists. I am a precept for four colleges of pharmacy, so I get students every month … that have never worked a day in the pharmacy”

There was also brief discussion of the lack of time available for this type of training. Many on the panel feel that companies should pay them for the time they spend and any travel expenses they incur in pursuit of continuing education or other training.

“When you’re already working 60 hours a week, you’re not going to take your only day off to go do training— you have to build it into the schedule,” one pharmacist said.