Pharmacists are useless

The fact that a pharmacist can be jailed for mistakes in dispensing should tell you the value of the work

That is kind of like saying that "all dentists do" is pull teeth and plug holes.

They are trained to spot contra effects with medicines and to advise on lesser medical complaints.

The fact that a pharmacist can be jailed for mistakes in dispensing should tell you the value of the work

Friend of mine is doing a pharmacy apprenticeship which allows him to work his way up to manager role anyway so rofl. I guess for those doing a degree its just so they can dispense the drugs and understand them on a chemical level

As a young doctor I can say I wholeheartedly disagree with you, they are extremely helpful and are a very useful resource within hospitals and communities. They dispense but also check prescriptions for errors, pick up issues that prescribers may have missed such as doses being different for people with different renal function/weights, and can be very helpful with working out which drug is causing side effects and things such as that or can be asked for advice if a prescriber wishes to prescribe something which is more tricky or less commonly used.

LOL how many years is his apprenticeship?

Fair enough. I guess I don't know what goes on behind the scenes! I've rarely seen the pharmacist I work with talk about the ingredients in a drug and what it will cause. But can't a computer work out what dosage you require according to your weight etc

Thing is, that's a pharmacist's job, to talk to patients about what's in their medicines and explain how they work. Do you work there or are you shadowing people for a while? When I did work experience at school I didn't see much of what the actual pharmacist did because I was working with the pre-reg student. But at work, I do dispensing and counter stuff, because I'm still a student, but my boss is really good and he lets me watch him counsel patients on different things, he's been doing this for ages so he knows his stuff, and also counsels patients on what's in their medicines, how they might interact with one another, computers can flag up interactions and things but they can't really take into account the human factor, pharmacy nowadays is shifting towards a more patient-centered approach a lot more, and also technicians are taking on a lot of the tasks pharmacists traditionally did and that leaves pharmacists more scope to use their clinical knowledge. I mean generally yes I think there's less opportunity to really make use of your degree in community pharmacy as it stands, in comparison to hospital pharmacy (but I'm biased because that's what I want to do), but that doesn't in any way mean that pharmacists as a whole are useless, or that community pharmacists are useless. Also, considering the current hysteria around whether or not robots are going to take over our jobs, pharmacy is actual one of the fields that's less likely for that to occur. Which indicates that we're far from useless (not of course that anyone whose job might eventually be taken over by robots is useless, just that it indicates pharmacists have a skillset which can't be easily thrown away just because some people undervalue it)

And yes, pharmacists do a bit of dispensing, it's good to keep those skills and honestly, as long as it doesn't become 100% of what a pharmacist does I do think it's important for us to keep doing at least a little of it, especially when a pharmacy is busy because that work needs to be done and there's no point in considering ourselves too qualified or too important for the work when we're trained to do it.

As a (soon to be) hospital pharmacy pre-reg I'm not in the best position to comment on community pharmacists, but pharmacists who work in hospital are hardly every in the dispensary "putting stickers on your medicines"

They're on the ward calculating drug doses, recommending optimum therapy, speaking to patients about how they're getting on with their meds, advising doctors on what to prescribe, prescribing medicines themselves (if taken the prescribing course), working out drip rates on infusions, discontinuing/changing medicines if inappropriate for example if the patient has a poor renal function.

The pharmacist does loads more but thats just a few important tasks

Hope I've educated you xoxoxo