Description: At this year’s pharmacy show and many recent conferences, I have given presentations on behavioural economics. People’s health outcomes are greatly
determined by behaviours outside the pharmacy or other health settings. Whether they take their medicines, give up smoking or eat healthily, these choices are
made at home in the course of their daily lives.
How many minutes of the 168 hours in a week, are your customers in contact with you? For many pharmacists, behavioural economics is a ‘new’ discipline and often
flies in the face of what we learned at university years ago. People had symptoms, often traced back to a disease, which led to a treatment, which the patient
took (as instructed) and got better. If only! In the context of healthcare, behavioural economics shows that people do not always make decisions based purely
on rational cost-benefit analysis. Instead, our choices are often shaped by factors like cognitive biases, social influence, and environmental cues. Once you’ve
left university and started practicing in the real world, this should not come as a surprise. The fact is people do not always act in their own best interest and
people do not always do the “right” thing, even if they know what the right thing is.
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Tag: behavioural economics in pharmacy, cognitive biases in healthcare, pharmacy patient behavior, health outcomes and pharmacy