Case studies: Community pharmacist: Wajid Hussain

Wajid works as a pharmacist manager of a very busy branch of the Co-operative Pharmacy. He completed his pre-registration training with the Co-op following a summer placement with them during his pharmacy degree at the University of Bradford, and worked first as a relief manager before taking up his current position.

I started my pharmacy degree having already obtained a BSc in Chemistry with Chemical Engineering. It was whilst undertaking a one-year industrial placement as an analytical chemist as part of my first degree that I realised I wanted a more people-focused than lab-based job. I feel I made the right choice to change direction as working as a community pharmacist is definitely me.

My job is about people, both the staff that work for me and my customers. In order to ensure that the pharmacy runs smoothly I need to balance my clinical skills and knowledge with being organised, using my initiative and establishing relationships with customers in order to win their confidence which is particularly important with elderly customers.

My degree course prepared me well, developing my communication and teamwork skills, but it was my work experience in the lab that developed my ability to prioritise and organise my work, an essential skill when juggling the demands of my job which include an increasing variety of tasks including preparing prescriptions for collection by customers, liaising with doctors and other healthcare professionals about the content of some prescriptions, counselling and advising the public on the treatment of minor ailments and providing a range of specialist health check services.

I would recommend that students get a range of experience whist they are at university, ideally in a hospital, as well as community pharmacy to gain an understanding of the different roles and if possible experience community pharmacy in different locations as some pharmacies are much busier with a faster pace than others, and you will get a feel for what kind of an environment you are best suited to.

The role of the community pharmacist is changing, even in the two years since I have been in the job, from offering more services than just dispensing, with customers seeing the pharmacist as the first port of call when they have a health-related problem, to being contracted by the PCT to provide other services such as supervised methadone consumption and smoking cessation programmes as well as conducting reviews of a patient’s regular medication.

Continuous professional development is now a mandatory requirement of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) and so a pharmacist needs to keep up to date with the knowledge and skills enabling them to continue practising as a competent pharmacist, this includes regularly attending training events organised by the local PCT, or completing short courses on various topics.

The pressure of developing the business and achieving various targets can be challenging as well as frustrating. Dealing with the occasional irate customer can be a downside of the job, although thankfully this doesn't happen often.

Once I have been qualified for three years I hope to become a pre-registration tutor responsible for supervising the training of a pre-registration student. Other opportunities open to me would be to complete my clinical diploma, or train to be an independent pharmacist prescriber.