Robert Boyce outside the Student Health Service Building. Photo courtesy of Godofredo Vasquez, Mid-Valley Health
“For more than two decades, Robert Boyce has championed a method of counseling pharmacy patients that he was certain did a better job of ensuring those patients understood their prescriptions. It’s a simple technique: Instead of a pharmacist spending a minute or 90 seconds briefly lecturing patients about their prescriptions, or referring to printed instructions that patients often ignore, the pharmacist asks three basic, open-ended questions: What is the name and purpose of the medication? How should the medication be used and stored? What should be expected after taking the medication and what side effects are possible? Boyce, the director of pharmacy services at Oregon State University’s Student Health Center, has believed that by asking the questions, a pharmacist ends up with a better sense of what patients know – and, maybe more important, what they don’t know. The pharmacist can fill in those gaps. The result should be patients who are better informed about their prescriptions.”
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