At your independent community pharmacy, you and your staff are likely the go-to health expert for patients’ questions and concerns. You know your patients by name, you know their medical conditions and you may even see them more often than they see their own physicians. Build on that expertise by positioning your pharmacy as a place for healthy living education and support.
By providing expert knowledge and advice, or creating new programs in your pharmacy, you can help your patients live better, healthier lives.
Here are five tips to encourage and promote healthy living in your pharmacy.
1. Become an expert in nutritional products
Supplying vitamins, dietary supplements and other nutritional products can help your patients, and stocking new inventory can also potentially increase your front-end profits.
Consider your current patients’ health conditions and medication regimens. Would supplements or vitamins benefit them? And if so, what kind?
Stock your front end with careful precision and educate yourself on how to best recommend those products to your patients. They’ll appreciate the extra thought you put into their health and be interested in browsing the new product lines you have to offer in your front end.
2. Create a smoking cessation program
Tobacco use is the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Help your patients fight their addiction by establishing a smoking cessation program in your pharmacy. Offering support, education and counseling, or providing nicotine replacement therapy to your patients can drastically decrease their risk for heart disease, stroke or death.
3. Be a weight management counselor
Obesity is a growing epidemic in the U.S. The CDC reported that 35.1 percent of U.S. adults are obese, 69 percent are considered overweight and 20.5 percent of adolescents are obese.
Help guide your patients into leading a healthier lifestyle by creating weight loss or weight management programs.
Provide risk assessments, weekly health screenings or medication therapy management to patients with conditions related to being overweight or obese. Providing personal counseling to help your patients lose weight or lead healthier lifestyles will prove to your patients that you care about their well-being.
4. Provide healthy living information
Promoting health and wellness in your pharmacy can be as simple as providing easily accessible health information.
Consider setting up an arrangement of educational brochures patients can browse while they wait on their prescriptions. Or, designate a space in your pharmacy as a health information center, complete with pamphlets, a tablet or computer with helpful health care apps and a bulletin board advertising health-related events, such as local yoga classes.
5. Become an activist
Make your pharmacy known around town as the place to go for health expertise.
Collaborate with other local health care professionals to promote healthy living practices, such as health screenings and immunizations. Organize charitable events, such as a 10k to raise money for heart disease.
Becoming a health activist will market your pharmacy and increase name recognition of your pharmacy. But, more importantly it will build your reputation as a trusted source for health information and guidance.
Being known as an expert in health advice will have people talking about your pharmacy.
