Return to Blogger: End of Exile

Dear Diary,

Okay, Blogger is back again. I was contemplating whether to transfer the previous 2 entries from LiveJournal back to Blogspot, but I think not. Should leave those 2 entries to remind me how vulnerable we are if we depend on just one option in life. We always must have alternatives so that we do not get held back by the very option we prefer. =) My 8-day leave is ticking down rapidly and I am bracing for the working life once again. Not that I do not enjoy what I do for a living… just that it is a very time-demanding job. A glance through the updated roster and I knew my fellow colleague who helps me with the roster must have had a torrid time when I was away in Hong Kong. We are indeed short-handed in our rapidly expanding company.

Last night, I caught up with a fellow pharmacist for dinner at Margaritas (a Mexican restaurant along Siglap Road). It was a nice dinner, albeit a little costly ($40). I ate some traditional Enchiladas and had a pitcher of Peach & Honey drink. Sometimes, it can be sad that the topics pharmacists speak about when they gather are usually the complaints and the despondence that perpetuated in it. This friend of mine works in pharmaceutical sales for a couple of years and have decided to start afresh in gathering her clientele. Apparently, she told me that she no longer finds that her sales scope has any challenge after a few years… and she wanted to start from scratch in gathering sales from more difficult customers, the hospitals…. Rather than the private clinics she is currently doing. In doing that, she is compromising on her comfortable sales incentives and targets… It just goes to show that income does not guarantee job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is the very essence that determines if a person stays in a job.

Other than browsing through my collection of Hong Kong photos and talking about the tours we went… she brought up about the plight of pharmacists in Singapore. There is a prevailing perception that the majority of our local pharmacists do not measure up to our European and American counterparts. Is that true? Possibly…. After all, when I started work in community pharmacy, I wasn’t even aware the danger of prescribing topical salicylic acid for people with diabetes mellitus. I only knew that when a locum pharmacist formerly working in the UK, counselled that to a customer.

I am currently reading a layman’s book titled “Deadly Drug Interactions: The People’s Pharmacy Guide” and I realised that I do not know quite a number of drug-drug and drug-herb interactions. Fibre can impede digoxin and despiramine absorption? Hmmm… I could not recall all the symptoms of medical conditions like serotonin syndrome, hypokalemia … and have problems with regurgitating side effects of drugs. Okay, I wasn’t such a bad student in my university years I can assure you that, haha… Now, I am not too impressive though… hmmm…

The more knowledgeable pharmacists are those in hospital practice. No doubt about that. However, while they have the knowledge… they don’t have the time to communicate effectively. Sometimes, I just hope there is an avenue to bring up this issue. The quick and highly efficient information-laden counselling at the bedside or the pharmacy counter is not working! I get tonnes of patients from hospitals asking me what those medications are for!!!! Don’t even talk about precautions and side-effects… they don’t even know the indications for their medications.

While the government is trying their best to attain the doctor-hospitalised patient ratio of 1:1 from the current 1:2, nothing is done at the pharmaceutical side. Not only do we lack good governmental initiatives like more efficient computer systems to detect interactions, we also lack manpower. We are a badly over-worked profession. If that still sounds okay, check out the PSS executive council. Due to the apathy of practising pharmacists, those holding positions in council are “stuck” there because not many are willing to step forward to help.

I am not a die-hard pharmacy zealot if you could call it but since I am in it, I can’t help feeling that something must be done to the profession-at-large and the dear university curriculum taught by the pharmacy department, the…. Oh well, sometimes, I think we (as pure-breed scientific pharmacists) are so data-oriented that we make decisions so slowly. We need a survey to prove this and that, before we make decisions. If pharmacists were more artistic than scientific, we would have trusted our intuitions more… making a more vocal and spontaneous impact for our profession.

I am expecting dispensing rights in 8 years’ time… hope my expectations aren’t far-fetched! =) By the way, for most of the criticisms… I am just as guilty as many of my fellow professionals. We need to change.

God Bless,

Andrew