The doors that Pharmacy have opened for me

At grammar school, I did not know what I wanted to study at University. However, what I did know was that I wanted to help people and be part of the healthcare team. So, instead of going straight to University, I decided that I would take some time out of education to grow as a person before making a huge commitment to further study. In many countries across the world, the merit of growing as a person in your adolescent years is greatly valued and there are many dedicated programmes that support students with structured gap years. I was lucky enough to be accepted onto one of these programmes and left for Israel to work in a hospice straight after my A-level results were announced. Being dropped into the middle of charity run hospice in the middle of a new country certainly helped me find myself and made me realise what was important to me. My experience exposed me to all aspects of the healthcare team who were having to make difficult decisions about patients who had no-one else to look after them. It was here that I was able to appreciate the key role that pharmaceuticals and pharmacists have in helping treat patients; even those who are terminally ill.

On leaving Israel, I started my MPharm at the University of Brighton and my eyes were opened up to a whole new world of possibilities that being a pharmacist could bring. The School was extremely aspirational and nurtured my desire to be a pharmacist with a difference. Studying back at the end of the nineties, prescribing pharmacists was to be the future of pharmacy and my lectures around these developments made me want to be a trailblazer and at the cutting edge of the opportunities that pharmacy could provide.

After graduation, the reality of the day-to-day pharmacy practice set in and, for a short while, I thought that the new clinical developments that were discussed at university would be for someone else to experience and benefit from, not me. That was until I worked in a small East Sussex town where I decided that I wanted to get to know my local Primary Care team better, so I approached them with ideas of services and support that my team could provide. It was at this point that I realised that you are the only one in the driving seat of your career and it is for you to go out and seek out what interests you. If asked, I would say that networking is one of my key skills and is so transferable to all aspects of one’s life. Hand in hand with networking is communication, and it is imperative that you reflect on your communication style and seek feedback from those around you.

It is important for me to acknowledge that my clinical practice in community pharmacy has been (and I think always will be) extremely significant to me so when I did seek new opportunities, I also kept my hand in with community pharmacy. Many roles can take you away from the patient-facing aspects that the role of community brings and, for me, this is the most rewarding part so I would not want to give this up.

After establishing strong links with the Primary Care team, I was able to demonstrate my value to them and became employed as a prescribing advisor. This was relatively new back in the early noughties, so we were able to carve out a new role that would incorporate supporting prescribers with good evidence-based decisions. This provided me with the opportunity to write policies and develop local formularies, as well as getting involved in the training of other healthcare professionals around good medicine management decisions. It was during this time that I decided that I would like to develop my trainer/educator role and approached the local University to see if I would be able to support their degree programme as a practitioner.

At the University, I was exposed to the academic world of pharmacy and the true joy that one can derive from nurturing students at the start of their careers to becoming influencing leaders. It was also during this time that I started to explore different routes through which I could utilise my pharmacy skills in unusual settings. For example, I was selected to go to Glastonbury Music Festival and to volunteer with the medical team to provide pharmacy services to the festival staff and music goers. I was also selected out of tens of thousands of pharmacists to volunteer at the London 2012 Olympic Games. This experience was to set me on a new path within the world of pharmacy: “Drugs In Sport”. This area of pharmacy is still relatively small, but it is growing year on year. In fact, since 2014, I have been part of the PGA European Tour medical support team and attend golfing events to support medics and physios with medicine management issues.

The MPharm degree has evolved significantly since I studied at the end of the nineties to ensure that the science, which underpins every aspect of pharmacy, is integrated into practice. Many aspects of what we learn is ground in evidencebased medicine which integrates clinical expertise with the research evidence and patient values. Pharmacists need to be able to interpret this information to deliver safe and effective care to their patients. This is why it is imperative that we have students who are able to utilise the knowledge, skills and capabilities that they gain in their undergraduate programme to ensure that the following mantra is achieved every time “the right medicines at the right time to the right patient.”

Continuing professional development has been a continual thread throughout my career and the educational aspects of this led me to undertake various higher educational courses such as my Independent Prescribing, Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and most recently a certificate focusing on drugs in sport run by the International Olympic Committee. My pharmacy journey is not over, I hope to continue to grow as a pharmacist and am excited about my next adventure.

Claire May MRPharmS IP FHEA PGDip