Over the years as a training provider, we have been asked so many times if we provide phlebotomy training for pharmacists. The answer has always been ‘yes’ but there has remained a gap in how to use the skill set within your pharmacy. What services could be commissioned? What services could you offer directly to your customers?
Therefore, we have partnered up with Medichecks whose mission is to “make state-of-the-art laboratory blood testing available to everyone”. In our usual ‘one stop shop’ style, we look to see how we can provide community pharmacists information around the whole service.
Within your pharmacy you could offer both finger prick blood testing and venous sample testing to your customers. Useful for diagnosing a condition, checking the risk of something that runs in their family, or optimising their health or fitness regime.
There is over 600 blood, saliva, urine and stool laboratory tests available direct to you and once you have registered an account with them, you can order your selected tests and they will be sent with a pre-paid enveloped to return them for testing. You will have access to the results online once ready.
Whether a patient has typical allergic, or ongoing idiopathic, symptoms then this is a good way of confirming whether they are an allergy sufferer.
Basic allergy testing can be performed quickly and easily using the finger-prick method and measures the total level of IgE in the body which can indicate if they are an allergy sufferer.
If the IgE level is raised, then patients may wish to have further allergy blood tests to see whether specific allergens can be identified.
These would be tested from a venous sample that could be taken at the community pharmacy and specific allergens testing requested. For a relatively larger cost to the patient, a test for a wide variety of allergens could also be offered, which might include, for e.g. foods; grasses; trees; latex; house dust mites; molds and cats/dogs/horses.
Every year they sell thousands of tests from individual markers like vitamin D or testosterone to complete wellness profiles checking for diabetes, heart disease risk, hormone status and more. They have expertly designed profiles for sports men and women, for people who are struggling to lose weight or have lost their get-up-and-go, for the thyroid community, as well as for those who just want the peace of mind a comprehensive health check can provide.
Is this something you could offer to your customers?
Some areas you could test?
• General health check
• Adrenal & Fatigue
• Diabetes
• Heart Disease
• Men’s Health
• Women’s Health
• Allergy & Nutrition
• Fertility & Pregnancy
• Hormones
• Thyroid Health
• Bladder & Bowel
• Liver & Kidney
• Travel & Immunology (could be a good one internally for your Hep B cover!)
If you want to start offering these types of tests then:
• Book onto a Phlebotomy training course: click here (or contact us direct for a group booking)
• You will need to gain some ‘live’ supervised practice after the training, people often make contact with their local GP Practice to work in a clinic with a nurse
• Open your practitioner account with Medichecks by contacting Business team on 0345 0660022 or email on business@medichecks.com
