Sodermalm, Sweden
Ahlens Pharmacy & Socialstyrelsen
Today was rather uneventful overall. We found our way to the Ahlens Pharmacy office where we met with Amadou Jallow who is our coordinator for Tuesday-Thursday. He gave us a short introduction to Ahlens Pharmacy. Ahlens is actually a departments store--much like a Macy's or a Dillard's back in the states. They were initially concerned that pharmacies would threaten their business by taking away costmetics and beauty aid customers. Then they realized that they could offer this service to their customers! They are not competing for new business; they simply want to offer this additional service to their existing customers. We visited the first Ahlens pharmacy which is on the island of Sodermalm. There is another one in Norkoping, and three more will open within the year. This pharmacy is actually the first one built from the ground up since the re-regulation of pharmacy services by the government (aka the breaking of the monopoly). It is also the first one to have an entirely new computer system, which is designed by the Ahlens corporation. By the way, Ahlens appears to have a very impressive business model and is a family-owned company. All Ahlens stores are located in city centers. In fact, which the pharmacy is opened in the Ahlens City branch, this will be the best-located pharmacy in all of Stockholm as the Ahlens City branch actually has an entrance from the Central Tunnelbana station.
The pharmacy was very differently organized from pharmacies in the US. It was much smaller and arranged in a much more compact way. At this time, this pharmacy only fills about 20-30 prescriptions per day. This is probably related to the lack of advertisement by the Ahlens corporation for pharmacy services. However, this is actually a good thing as the computer system is not yet equipped to handle a lot of prescriptions. This will be more likely when the updated version comes out later this month. OTC products are much different here in Sweden--the -triptans and diclofenac are drugs sold OTC rather than by prescription only. There is also a special section for domestic animals. We also went to two pharmacies across the street to see how they were set up differently from the one in the Ahlens store.After this, we got on a bus to the Socialstyrelsen. This is the National Board of Health & Welfare in Sweden. We met a man who works with their prescription registry for lunch where we had a semi-smorgasbord. It was Thai food with some extra Swedish stuff on the side, but it was definitely a buffet, so we're counting it! After that, Andrejs explained the registry to us. Basically, each pharmacy system (as now there is more than just one) reports certain information each month via computer to the database. Via this database, much information can be examined and cross-referenced with other databases to determine trends. Each Swedish person has a special number, kind of like a social security number. The system converts this number to an anonymous number which will then match things like prescriptions, diseases, and death. Researchers get special permission to utilize this database. It's a lot more technical than that, but those are the very basics. This would be amazing to have in the US, but also very difficult to implement.
After this, we took the Tunnelbana back to the hotel and went for a walk around the city. We ate dinner at the place we had lunch with Birgitta on Monday. It was fabulous--especially dessert! Yum! Then we stopped by a grocery store where I found some kinder buenos and headed back to the hotel for the rest of the night!
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