Never give in

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
-Winston Churchill

While I would never compare our struggle with the Ontario government to the threats facing the world when Churchill delivered his first speech as Prime Minister, I can draw great inspiration from his words, some 70 years after they were so eloquently spoken.

The pharmacy community is understandably feeling frustrated as weeks have passed since the announcement of massive front-line health care cuts by the government with little change from their original position. Pharmacists, pharmacy staff, students and patients have rallied at Queen’s Park and at MPP offices, have presented hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions and have been the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles and media pieces over the past two months. Yet today, the Health Minister announced that the regulations will pass essentially unchanged.

The days and weeks ahead will be very difficult for many pharmacists. Pharmacists will question whether the entire campaign was worth the effort since very little movement was made on the part of the government. We will struggle with the difficult decisions that will need to be made in order to keep our practice afloat. If we want to survive, we can no longer be the easygoing, friendly health care professional providing countless services to patients for free. The days of walking up to a pharmacy counter and obtaining free advice or services from the pharmacist are over.

Our profession will be forced to evolve if we are to remain viable. The way we deliver services and the way we charge for the services that we provide will need to change dramatically. We will need to actively seek new practice opportunities and take full advantage of our expanded scope of practice, even if it means direct patient billing for the services provided. Our dispensing activities, once the main source of pharmacy revenue and main focus of our day will need to become streamlined and more efficient. The fees charged for dispensing will need to increase considerably to cover the previous subsidized funding gap, as well as the gap left on the public drug plan side.

We were all warned in the beginning that this was going to be a marathon and not a sprint. This is truly a war, and one that we must be determined to fight to the end. We have spent a lot of energy educating the public and warning of the potential effects of the funding cuts. The hour is upon us, and the public will soon feel the effects of the reckless Liberal health care cuts.

As pharmacists, we can choose to fight, or we can choose to die. We will do what we need to do to survive, and Ontarians can decide what type of pharmacy care they prefer. My bet is that they like what they are receiving now a whole lot better than what they will be getting by November 2011. We need to make sure they are reminded every day of the people who caused the change.

June 7th will forever live in history as a dark day for the profession of pharmacy in Ontario. The only advice I can give my fellow pharmacists today is this- again from Sir Winston Churchill...

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.