When we head to our local community pharmacy to fill a prescription we aren’t always aware of the challenging and stressful environment within which pharmacists, our societies front line healthcare professions work. The overload of stress can unfortunately lead to pharmacist burnout and medication errors.
They struggle to fill prescriptions, give flu shots, tend the drive-through, answer phones, work the register, counsel patients and call doctors and insurance companies, they said — all the while racing to meet corporate performance metrics that they characterized as unreasonable and unsafe in an industry squeezed to do more with less.
Keith Loria explains in his recent article on How to Prevent Pharmacist Burnout about how this environment can impact cognitive capabilities required to fulfil the role that carries a high level of professional responsibility.
Stress at work can affect their emotional and mental clarity, cognitive alertness, and can make it difficult to concentrate—all of which increase the likelihood of accidents.
Being a pharmacist carries tremendous responsibility as a professional,” she says. “Your job is not only to dispense, but to clinically assess if the medication is not therapeutically duplicated, there are no interactions, no mistakes with the doses, no allergies to the class of drugs, no contraindications for the drug, no underdosing, no overdosing, vaccination administration, and so much more. That’s a lot of weight.
Is there way that artificial intelligence could help? Are there repetitive tasks that can be automated to alleviate workload? In relation to tasks that require cognitive effort could clinical support be provide? MUUTAA can help. Let’s discuss.