Hospital Pharmacist

I have been recently looking into what I want to study at university (and then have a career in). I am intrigued about the prospect of pharmacy, because I am interested in different drugs, what they do and how they work. Especially from a chemistry perspective. I have looked at different careers, and have decided community pharmacy would not be for me (for a multitude of reasons). However, I feel like I can't find a definitive and clear explanation as to what a hospital pharmacist does on a day to day basis as part of their job, and how it differs from community. I was wondering if someone could explain this to me? Thank you.

Reply 1

BBtinstorm

Hello, I’m a pharmacy student that’s going into 2nd year. I’ve had a few placements in hospital and I work in a community pharmacy. I’ve found that hospital is completely different to community pharmacy. In community you’re pretty much just checking items all day, you have the odd patient that needs you to look at something, but it tends to be more focused on clinical/ legal checking than speaking to patients. Hospital pharmacy is really varied depending on which department you work in. For the most part you go around the wards checking all the doctors prescribing and discuss any medication changes with patients. You can also do the item checking part in the pharmacy section of the hospital but most people who go into hospital want to be more hands on with the patients/ wards.The main difference is in hospital you speak to more patients. You learn a lot about the chemistry of drugs, but you never really bring it up in practice because it’ll just confuse the patients. I’d say that hospital has more chemistry involved since you’re more likely to have drug interactions if patients are being given new meds, whereas, in community you get a lot of the same thing since it’s usually repeat prescriptions that don’t change very often.I don’t know much about it, but you can also become a GP pharmacist, you do a similar job to GP’s if you’re a prescriber however a lot of it’s done over the phone. You basically call patients to do medication reviews (checking if their meds are working/ no problems).Hope that helps!