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16 AWARENESS SPOTLIGHT FROM PAGE 15 This is where pharmacists and pharmacy assistants are really important. There’s a bit of an urban myth about heart disease, that women are protected with oestrogen and that it’s a man’s disease. The fact is that women are often undiagnosed, or they receive less treatment, and they often have poorer treatment outcomes compared with men. That’s because of their presentations that are different to the classic symptoms. There’s also a lack of knowledge that women have different symptoms to men, so this is why we’re really focused on bringing that to light. An alarming thing to think about is that in the first six months post a cardiac event, women are twice as likely to die compared with men. How can retail pharmacy assistants get involved with the organisation? Pharmacists and pharmacy assistants have a special role. When people go to get their medications – and there are different services that can be offered in a pharmacy, like using kiosks, if these are available, to measure BMI – I think it’s important to talk about risk, and how to mitigate the risk. The risks are pretty well known and include being overweight, not moving around too much, eating badly, smoking, consuming excess alcohol, and having high cholesterol. Those are all risks. The healthy message, about how to mitigate that, can happen in a pharmacy. Giving those messages to customers who come in for their medicines or other items in a pharmacy is really quite important. It’s quite an important conversation to have. “An alarming thing to think about is that in the first six months post a cardiac event, women are twice as likely to die compared with men.” What are the key things pharmacy assistants need to know when supporting their customers who may be at risk of heart disease, or who may be in rehab post heart event, etc.? How can pharmacy assistants help increase public awareness about women and heart disease? Pharmacy assistants are the front desk of the pharmacy in a lot of ways. They have a good knowledge of the products and other things available in the pharmacy. If somebody is asking about weight loss products, that could be a good time to talk about exercise. It’s grabbing those moments to talk about mitigating heart disease risk. Alerting people, and particularly women, to Her Heart as a resource is also important. There’s a lot of material and resources that we have on our website that they may not be able to find easily on the web. As I said, our resources are all evidence based. We’re really focused on having good quality information for people, in one place. So, alerting customers to Her Heart, which is simply herheart.org – it’s easy to Google. And the third thing is to have that conversation about whether they’ve had a heart health check. This should happen every year, but it’s not happening as regularly as that in reality. In a survey that we conducted about women and heart disease and what women know about heart disease, we found that about 70 per cent of the women knew that heart disease was an issue for women, but more than 50 per cent had never had a heart health check. Having a heart health check with the GP every year is an important thing to bring up with pharmacy customers. I think pharmacy assistants can bring that up by asking, ‘Have you had a heart health check with your GP in the last 12 months?’ That would be a great question. And engaging with our website: we’ve got a heart health checklist that can be downloaded. It identifies things that the person can then speak to the GP about, because people might say, ‘Well, I don’t know what to say to the GP about heart health’. This checklist can really help cut through and help people have those conversations with their GP. RETAIL PHARMACY ASSISTANTS • APR 2021 For more about Her Heart, visit: herheart.org