February 2022

With Aotearoa at red in the traffic light settings in a bid to keep Omicron at bay, stockpilers have returned in droves and cleared entire supermarkets and pharmacies of their pain-relief stock.

Many in the pharmacy sector are looking to automation to ease their workforce woes, as the pandemic drags on and the reality of becoming short-staffed at a moment’s notice comes too close for comfort.

Pharmacy owner Richard Brown was born and raised in Gore, Southland. But after he completed his training at Otago University, he took off to the top of the North Island and never looked back.

An application to reclassify the gout prevention medicine allopurinol for dispensing without a prescription by trained pharmacists, has been delayed at the request of the submitter.

After getting increasingly concerned about the workforce shortage, Kerikeri pharmacy owner Vicki Douglas approached the Otago School of Pharmacy with an idea: what if she paid for students to travel up to rural Northland for their third-year placements?

The Auckland Pharmacy Students’ Association has launched a non-academic peer mentoring programme for students at the University of Auckland’s School of Pharmacy.

The findings of a damning report by Pharmac, which highlights significant medicine access inequities, are “concerning but not surprising”, says the agency’s chief medical officer David Hughes.

Waiuku pharmacist Feras Dawood has been struck off and fined for attempting to frame a junior colleague for a dispensing error he made that resulted in a woman being hospitalised.

Twelve Auckland pharmacies have started offering pregnant women doses of the blood product anti-D in a groundbreaking pilot.