Tribune. Vaccination appears every day more as a condition of our freedoms, individual and collective. To allow easy, effective and safe access to vaccines, it must therefore become the business of all health professionals, including pharmacists, and this in a sustainable manner, during but also after the Covid pandemic. They are ready and they want it!
Since the start of the health crisis, their role as a local health professional has been essential and strengthened, in particular through the vaccination against Covid-19 for which they have vaccinated, in just two months, more than a million and a half French (monitoring of Covid-19 vaccination in GERS Data pharmacies /Cegedim, data as of June 8, 2021).
In addition, thanks to the confidence and support of the French in dispensing vaccination in pharmacies, the last influenza campaign was a real success, with more than 3.7 million people being vaccinated there.
Collective responsibility
According to an April Ipsos survey, conducted with the institutional support of the Pfizer laboratory, among 1,018 elderly people, more than 90% of French people who have been vaccinated in pharmacies are satisfied and would recommend it to their relatives. More than three quarters of those questioned consider that pharmacists should be authorized to vaccinate adults who wish to prevent illnesses other than influenza.
Our responsibility is collective: we still have to develop and advance the prerogatives of the more than 50,000 community pharmacists practicing in the region. Pharmacists should no longer be called upon only in emergency situations, or be considered as a recourse for certain targeted campaigns! It is legitimate to invest them fully and durably in this public health mission.
Let’s protect ourselves from preventable, potentially serious infectious diseases today by making the right decisions to make vaccination simpler and faster: let the pharmacist become a full player in a more fluid vaccination journey! The delay in all vaccinations, particularly accentuated by the health crisis, poses a risk of recurrence of certain infectious diseases.
It is therefore time to make full use of the pharmacist’s skills and the power of the dispensary network across the country to improve vaccination coverage for the French, build confidence, free up medical time and reduce the number of hospitalizations linked to infectious diseases. For example, each year, nearly 16,000 hospitalizations linked to pneumonia could be avoided by vaccination in France.
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