Following Poor Locums

[Tony Schofield]

I appologise for getting a bit carried away but I am passionate about what I do, even after 11 years.

Don't EVER and I mean EVER apologise for being passionate about what you do. I wish there were more like you.

Regards

Tony S

PS That includes qualified pharmacists also.

[jaymags]

Thank you Tony.

[happy_bunny]

You are a manager or locum Bunny?

I am a manager, supposedly
Place seems to largely manage itself so I'm not sure if I'm having any effect - it is my first job since I qualified and my pre-reg was all about the clinical side so I don't feel like I know much about running a shop and managing staff and suchlike, I'm hoping it will come with time.
Reading this thread just made me think that the locums who work my days off might think I'm one of the poor managers to follow - I hope I'm not tho because I am really loving my job right now

[DavidS]

I don't feel like I know much about running a shop and managing staff and suchlike, I'm hoping it will come with time.

It will, but slowly and with many horrible and painful mistakes, in my experience.

There are useful books on management that you can read, and find a mentor within your company who is like you (only more experienced) you can discuss things with. If management is your job, then you need to focus your cpd and your attention on that, and quickly. A quick search of, e.g. Onion Bunny's experience will help show you what can happen if you don't.

On the other hand you may be one of those fortunate people who were brought up in a house where business management could be inhaled from the atmosphere - but in that case most of the books will appear to be stating the obvious to you, and you should go far with little effort.

For me it was a huge effort (and I didn't get terribly far, if truth be told)

[imaginegenerous]

I've just come across this - I realise it is really old but I imagine the same problems still exist. Everyone's complaints about following bad/lazy pharmacists have made me worry that perhaps I am one of the bad ones (!) but my fantastic technician makes it less obvious coz she does pretty much everything and reminds me about everything else. I have been 'manager' for nearly 2 months but I still feel like I'm winging it when the technician isn't there coz she has been working there 20+ years and has hiding places for stuff that I don't know about because I spend most of my time checking scripts and trying to keep on top of the latest 'initiative' from HO (they thought it would be better to leave the patient questionnaires and practice audit until they had a permanent pharmacist to do them so I now have until the end of this month to get them both done ). How long did it take other people to feel like they had a handle on basic pharmacy management after qualifying? At the moment I don't know if I would sink or swim if, for example, everyone left and I got new staff who didn't know the routine or where stuff was kept

I feel a little like this myself although I'll have been qualified five years this summer The first branch I managed I felt quite confident in once I found my feet as it was fairly quiet and I had a good shop supervisor who'd worked there for years and she was good at showing me the ropes with things like cashing up and organising staff holidays. I now work for a different company and I've never been shown how to cash up and whilst there's plenty of staff who can do it, I feel a bit of a fraud that I'm the manager and don't know the procedure (somthing I'll be bringing up with the AM at my forthcoming performance review ). I struggle with scripts for homeopathic items as a lot of things seem to have different names to what's on the script - the technicians just seem to have all this info stored in their heads! Having said that I think I could also be guilty of storing things that I do know in my head rather than writing it down somewhere for others to follow. The idea of a daily diary does sound good though.

[bobbin]

I struggle with scripts for homeopathic items as a lot of things seem to have different names to what's on the script - the technicians just seem to have all this info stored in their heads!

Interesting that you get scripts for homeopathic medicines. We don't get any around here - not even occasionally.

[PinkGlitter]

There seems to be a lot of homeopathic scripts around the Gloucestershire area. Handwritten and very hard to read! My first day as a pharmacist was in one of these pharmacies. Dispensary filled with lots of potions and powders. Luckily, I had 2 very knowledgeable assistants to help out!

[Tony Schofield]

How do you reconcile dispensing placebos with your CPD and ethical obligations?

[DavidS]

How do you reconcile dispensing placebos with your CPD and ethical obligations?

Galen: "First, do no harm."

Its well known that most diseases are self-limiting, so stimulating the patient's own power of recovery by using motivational techniques like placebo-giving (if that is all homeopathy is, which I doubt, whatever Ernzt says) is a viable first step.

Galen went on to say that the treatment should be through dietary control in the first instance, followed by vancomycin (I made that last bit up).

[Zoggite]

Amongst my Clientele in Belgium, I used to have a proud owner of an award-winning herd of pedigree Belgian Blue beef cattle: they used to suffer quite a bit with joint aches due to their excessive muscular build, as a lot of pedigree animals do; The farmer treated them with homeopathy, as there was no "waiting time" for using the milk of the meat of the animals. He used to swear by it, and he was as tight as anything, so it must have worked or he wouldn't have kept on spending his dear money on the stuff...?