His outstanding efforts made him this year's Honourable Mention in the Commitment to Care category of Patient Care. Using a model developed by Hepler and Grainger-Rousseau at the University of Florida, he teaches patients the basics of the disease, proper use of their medication devices, how to identify triggering effects and how to avoid them. He also develops a care plan for each patient so they can manage their asthma and track any initial worsening of their condition. Once patients understand how to care for their asthma, he notes, their symptoms lessen, their medication use improves and they begin to take control of their disease rather than being controlled by it. Dodge soon discovered that programs like these could be easily applied to other disease states, and recognized that diabetes is another area where patients could use some extra counselling.
Patients fill out questionnaires, each covering a different aspect of diabetes.
If the patient has made errors, the pharmacist zeroes in on these concepts and corrects the patient. If there are many errors, the patient may be referred back to a diabetes educator, or the pharmacist may schedule an appointment to see the individual for a longer period of time. Dodge has made his diabetes questionnaires available to 45 members of the Medicine Centre banner group, as well as to the 150 in-dependently owned pharmacies that are members of Unipharm Wholesale Drugs. According to Dodge, dealing with asthma and diabetes patients on a clinical level has become a way of practice. His goal now is to become the kind of health professional who takes the time and provides the education to help all patients understand and manage their own diseases, in the belief that this leads to better health outcomes.