PHARMACY owners are being urged to invest in training their pharmacy assistants (PAs), to ensure they meet the expectations of patients.
Pharmacy Guild of Australia National Present, Trent Twomey, told delegates at Pharmacy Connect last week, that there was a need for PAs to be given more training around healthcare products and services.
"It's a reasonable expectation of Australians, if they walk into an Australian pharmacy and get advice on a blood pressure monitor, a breast pump, on wound care, or complementary medicines, that the person given the advice has some form of training," he said.
"There's no mandatory training for PAs in Australia.
"I'm preaching to the choir [here], because by the very nature of you being in this room you are proactive and you are training your staff.
"But unfortunately, the majority of the profession aren't.
"They are doing the mandatory minimum requirement to be QCPP (Quality Care Pharmacy Program) accredited, which is Schedule 2, S3 training, but they haven't made sure their staff have Certificate 2, Cert 3 or Cert 4 [qualifications].
"If we want PAs to be able to help us out more in the pharmacy, ordering medicines, marking medicines off... that boring stuff, but that technically important stuff that we have to make sure that they're appropriately trained."
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