Pharmacy: Altruism, Aceticism or Masochism (Rating: R-G)

Dear Diary,

Yay! I am so happy to know today that I completed all 50 Continuing Pharmacy Education (CPE) points to meet the Pharmacy Board’s requirement for license renewal! =) If I do nothing from now onwards… I can still practice as a registered pharmacist till Sep 2010! By then, I really hope I don’t need that license anymore, haha… =) Frankly, I don’t know who reads this blog consistently. However, I hope there isn’t any pharmacy undergraduate reading this entry because it will be demoralizing. If you are a pre-registration pharmacist, that’s fine… you probably already feel and see the way I see. If you are a student, you still have time to turn away from this entry. Just remember all the beautiful picture that your retail or hospital preceptors (whoever he or she is, haha…) painted for you. This entry is rated R(G): Restricted to Graduates only.

If you have not already read so many newspaper articles on the pharmacy profession, you can now continue to read this one written by a Caucasian’s perception of our beloved profession in this beautiful country. You know something… as much as I may feel despondent towards the pharmacy profession, I love it. I love it because I studied it for 4 solid years, got a honours, trained for almost a year, worked and got promoted… It has become a way of life since 2001. A six-year love-hate affair. You may not believe… but I am very tempted many times to drop an article in the newspapers’ forum. I did not… Sigh… ok… let’s hear what someone from the United Kingdom has to say about us as he stands up for his wife, the pharmacist.

Pharmacist’s bitter bill

Treated poorly by public, management

Letter from Kevin McDonnell

I am writing in response to the article "MOH to recruit more pharmacists from overseas" (Sept 17).

My wife is a pharmacist trained and qualified in the United Kingdom who worked in one of Singapore's largest hospitals for two years and rotated through the different pharmacies and disciplines.

She showed no surprise at all that less than half of the pharmacists on the register are actually involved in direct patient care as the turnover of pharmacists at the hospital was massive. Of the five foreign pharmacists recruited at the same time as my wife, only my spouse was left after 18 months.

The reasons? Pharmacists are routinely treated poorly by the public and senior management. They are considered an annoyance to doctors who seem oblivious to the fact that they have been trained for five years to do the job they are doing, and are pharmacists because they are experts in the field of drugs and understand the effects of the drugs at least as well as the doctors.

They are forced to suffer the abuse of the public who still think that "good service" means that they have the right to shout at staff no matter how wrong they are. To make this worse, the management offer no support no matter how bad the situation. In addition, the pay for a pharmacist here is far, far less than that in other developed countries.

To make things worse, the poor working conditions led to a situation where there was never enough pharmacists to operate the department effectively. That meant that my wife and her colleagues were working up to 13 days in a row, and up to eight hours without a break.

When the fact that this was potentially dangerous was raised, the management just fobbed off the problem and blamed it on the lack of pharmacists in the department, ignoring that this was one of the reasons why so many had left.

My wife became stressed and worn out, and she lost any desire to carry on with a pharmacy career that she had spent five years working towards.

Pharmacists are not willing to be subjected to the conditions that they face in Singapore for long. The pharmacy department at the hospital received one of the lowest staff satisfaction scores in a survey conducted by the cluster to which the hospital belonged. Yet despite giving their reasons when asked, little was done to change anything.

My wife's employers and Ministry of Health officials emphasise pharmacist recruitment, but have neglected the greater problem of retention. The attitude in the pharmacy field here is that "everyone is replaceable", stated frequently to staff, whose natural response is to pursue careers away from direct patient care or to leave Singapore.

So, by all means, bring in the foreign pharmacists. They'll vote with their feet. And you'll be reading the same article in 18 months' time, if the root problems are not rectified.

Frankly, I no longer think that hospital is the best training ground for graduating pharmacists anymore. With the high turnover rate and the departure of many “more senior” pharmacists, wonder how the training is there now.

Okay, that’s all. Take care. =)

God Bless,

Andrew