Poor Pharmacist Career Prospects? What do Universities tell you?

My views on Pharmacy after 20 years:

1) When I did pharmacy and qualified around the year 2000 I locumed for a bit, the rate then was minimum £15-16 and the usual going rate was around £18-20. You could even get mileage and travel time top. The average rate now from a a C+D article is £21 in my area. I don't locum now but if this is true then the rate has gone down over 20 years rather than up. This should tell you all you need to know, that pay has gone down in real terms as to how much pharmacists are valued by the govt, employers and ultimately patients.

2) Hospital Pharmacy life is getting tougher. When I qualified there was a real lack of hospital pharmacists due to low pay as people could get double in community pharmacy compared to hospital. I started on around £18k + EDC in hospital in the 2000's when community were paying ATLEAST double that. As there was such a lack of ppl wanting to work in hospital, the employers and managers really valued you, now even in hospital they don't give a toss. The main reason for the change in attitude is that there are **too many pharmacists** fighting for jobs so even hospital employers know that you can easily be replaced so the senior pharmacist managers don't give a toss about you and don't value the pharmacists.

3) GP practice. This too has become a sweat shop over the last few years. I find that quite a few of these PCNs are employing ex-community types as managers, these are guys that have spent most of their lives in community pharmacy environment and are very target focused instead of clinically focused. Hence if you end up working in GP practices with these types they work you like a dog, they want you to do eg an acute/repeats requests in <2 mins, discharge letters recon <10mins, and tel med review <15 mins. These are the touted new "clinical role" but they are very far from that. It is basically taking the bottom barrel workload off the GPs and getting pharmacists to do it because they are cheaper. How to you do a med review in <15 mins for a patient who is on 15 meds? Basically you don't, you concentrate on 1-2-3 of the meds and ignore the rest, so patient gets a poor standard of care, but as long as you've ticked the "med review by pharmacist" checkbox, GPs get the QoF money, the lead pharmacist can show that the pharmacists are churning out (albeit poor) med reviews in sweat shop so he gets his bonus and everyone is happy except you as you know you've done a rubbish job and the patient will probably not benefit from what you are doing. But who care, right? It may beat community pharmacy but only slightly. It's 9-5 mostly sat behind a computer screen, alone, and not a very healthy environment, gives me back ache, dry eyes and I don't think will be doing it much longer - see below. On top of that the pharmacist manager at our place is a right k**b, he actually spies on you to check how much work you are doing, telling us we need to do x amount of repeat requests/med reviews per hour!! The other thing is that this work is very high risk compared to getting the same money for being effectively an accuracy checker in community. It's really high risk and the GPs and the Pharmacist manager do push you to work at a speed that's not safe. After all GPs are private businesses like Boots, and so the more they can get out of you they more money they save, the more money they make from QoF targets etc. which goes to the GPs partners pockets. GP land is a business, do not forget that.

4) I am pretty fed up with pharmacy in totality, I've done community, locumed, hospital and now work in a GP practice and if I was forced to choose would probably go back to hospital. I haven't done CCG work but imagine it would be similar to GP practice work to some extent. I was thinking of leaving the GP surgery anyway but was sticking it out as I didn't know what to do but it looks like my hand will be forced soon due to the mandatory v a x x . So it looks like my career in GP land will be over in April.

My advice basically is that 20 years ago pharmacy was a good/reasonable career as jobs were plentiful and wages pretty great especially in community. But all that is over now, and soon I heard that Amazon Pharmacy is coming, so just like they crushed the high street book stores, they will likely crush high street community pharmacy too.

Hence I would not advise anyone to spend £40k on a pharmacy degree from now. It is just not worth it.

I hope that what I have written above helps some people who are considering pharmacy make an informed choice

If anyone is in the same boat (ie will refuse jab > dismissal) please let me know what you plan to do as a future career and if anyone else on here can suggest any other roles then please do so (community pharmacy excepted of course). Thanks

CP has been in a dire state for decades now, the recent skyrocketing of locum rates was giving a glimpse of hope that at least while the job was miserable the pay made it sweeter, but locum rates are stabilising back to lower levels now.

As a GP pharmacist I'm sorry to hear your poor experience. I think I lucked out with my PCN (which is actually just two practices that are family run). Most of the negativity I hear from other pharmacists on my CPPE pathway is ones in medium to large PCNs: some working across five different sites, a different one each day, some barely doing any clinical work for over a year and were instead just providing COVID jabs to their entire population, others having to run a large amount of admin(searches, identifying patients for QOF) before they even get down to the clinical work. Pay is also variable but I've noticed a lot of PCNs advertising poor pay packages, equivalent to band 7.

I was going to ask about the scop of salary negotiation and when to negotiate?

There is a good chance a lot of people will be earning less than what they currently earn. Also where it says salaries are negotiable, what are good ballpark figures

Most of the negativity I hear from other pharmacists on my CPPE pathway is ones in medium to large PCNs: some working across five different sites, a different one each day, some barely doing any clinical work for over a year and were instead just providing COVID jabs to their entire population, others having to run a large amount of admin(searches, identifying patients for QOF) before they even get down to the clinical work. Pay is also variable but I've noticed a lot of PCNs advertising poor pay packages, equivalent to band 7.

Many of the PCNs are scamming the ARRS money. The GPs are getting £55k for each pharmacist they employ but only pay them around £35k so the difference lines the pockets of the GP partners. At my place we hardly get any supervision or training like we are meant to get which is why we will not be able to do these advanced roles although I've already been promised that I'll be signed off at end of it even though I've just started (they will have to sign us off as otherwise NHS England will start investigating the GP practices). GPs will then mug the govt again in 5-10 years using the same argument that they are not able to recruit suitably qualified individuals and they govt will run a similar scheme which GPs will again cream off. I never knew GPs and GP land was so corrupt that they would resort to this type of behaviour. In terms of work I do the bottom of the barrel work which GPs and even prescription clerks don't want to do doing repeat request/dx recon/tel med reviews and it's all monitored about how much I am doing per day and there's targets. Maybe I have been unlucky and have ended up at a sh*t PCN/GP practice but this situation will come to other PCNs/GP practices as targets increase and GPs wise up about what other mundane work they can get us to do.

I was really excited about the job when I took it up but 6 months in, I can't wait to leave and was looking for an out. It just so happens I'll get quitting in April as I don't want the jab so that makes things a bit easier.

I hope you can find a way of it to something better.