Sweden Day 13: Apoteket AB

16 April 2010

Stockholm, Sweden

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Apoteket AB Headquarters

Today, we took the Tunnelbana to Medborgarplatsen (bet you can’t pronounce that one...the Swedish language has some interesting interpretations of the letters…) We met Marianne Norelius after a trip through a mall on accident. She and a man named Thony (pronounced Tony) told us about Apoteket AB, or what is left of the 900 pharmacies originally owned by the government. There are now about 300 left, as the others have been sold to other companies in clusters.

In order to make their pharmacies attractive to existing customers, they have developed some new counseling services. Firstly, they do something like MTM where they talk with patients about their existing prescriptions. They have also developed a health check program which starts with an online assessment of Framingham risk. The patients pay for this service, then schedule a time to meet and discuss their results with the pharmacist. Health check counseling is available in the areas of obesity/weight loss, stress reduction, physical activity, and smoking cessation. Weight loss is their largest area of interest thusfar. There is also a troubled sleep assessment, but this is entirely web-based and helps patients keep a journal of their sleep habits in an effort to improve their sleep patterns.

After this, we were treated to lunch with Marianne and her colleague Anna. If I thought that yesterday was an amazing day for food, this day topped it. We ate at a fish restaurant, and Josh and I both got the Halibut. Oh-My-Gosh, it was a-maz-z-zing to quote PJ =) You can see the picture for yourself, but I don’t think it does it justice.

After lunch, we went back to Apoteket AB where Anna talked to us about Apoteket Farmaci which is the provision of hospital pharmacy services. At this time, Apoteket is really focusing on unit dose provision, as they send up an entire bottle of the medication to the various floors. We told of the glories of medication cabinets, patient-specific drawers on carts, and barcode administration.

The Apoteket AB HQ also had some lovely old pharmacy furniture. This actually looks very much like the furniture at the SAPS pharmacy museum that we visited earlier in the week. I'm glad that I got to photograph it. There is also a little Scheele statue (please refer to Monday's entry for further info).

Once we were done for the day, we had time to address our most recent major issue--the volcanic ash cloud that has shut down all air travel in Northern Europe--but not before stopping off at the Konditori for dessert! Back to the ash cloud: sounds like I'm making it up, right? Wrong. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/04/16/f-volcanic-ash-numbers.html Anyhow, we got some train tickets to Lulea on the overnight train (which I'm excited about because I love trains AND this gives us time to do a little more sightseeing in Stockholm!) which leaves Stockholm at 8:40 tomorrow night and arrives in Lulea at 11:00 on Sunday morning. I <3 sleeper cars! Yay!