Pharmacists - some of the invisible heroes of the pandemic
Associate Professor Lotte Stig Nørgaard, Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen, has written a column for May's issue of Helse on pharmacists - and has argued here that pharmacists as a professional group are too overlooked during the corona pandemic.
Lotte Stig Nørgaard is member of the editorial team for Helse, which is Denmark's most read health magazine, published in collaboration with Danish Regions, health authorities and patient associations.
There are more than 4,000 active pharmacists in Denmark, typically employed in the medicine / biotech / medico industry, in private pharmacies and in hospitals. During the pandemic, the pharmacists work i.a. with the following: At the hospitals, they are responsible for the dilution of BioNTech-Pfizer´s COVID-19 vaccine before it can be injected. At the Danish Medicines Agency, they constitute one of the four largest professional groups. Here, they help to assess whether the adverse effects reported are due to the vaccine or not. At the country's 506 pharmacies, they have answered thousands of corona-related questions in the past year, as closures in the rest of the healthcare system have at times made the pharmacy the only place one could go directly from the street and get answers. In large parts of the world, pharmacists are now in the process of vaccinating against corona. Read about this and much more in Lotte's column on page 42 in Helse (in Danish): Helse #05 May 2021
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksens spoke on 20 May at the General Assembly of the Danish Regions. Here she brought a pat on the back to some of the important professional groups in the health care system during the corona pandemic, among others the pharmacists (described in Fredag Formiddag ("Friday Morning"), Pharmadanmark's newsletter, on 21 May).