Pharmacy panic! Should I withdraw my application and apply to a new course next year?

Good afternoon Izzy,
May I start by congratulating you on your grades. it looks like you'll be able to do whatever you like this year or next.
Firstly, I've learned to ignore others that disregard fields of work/study. I studied medicine, and thoroughly hated it for a while. I'm now in practice, and adore my career, and indeed the journey here. I was told to become a nurse, pharmacist, physiotherapist, list is endless. Everyone has different opinions, none matter.

- Do bear in mind that if you really don't like it, you can complete a conversion masters/top-up degree in something else. In Scotland, these are 1-3 years, and can be completed in lots of things, including Nursing, Psychology, and various other fields. England are similar, apologies, I don't have the details. Google will help.
- Also do bear in mind if you get to year 2 or 3 and hate it, various English universities will take you into their courses. Pharma is a solid base for Allied Health Professional Degrees (radiotherapy, physiotherapy, podiatry etc, you know what I mean) and is an accepted entry to year 1 medicine in various universities alongside your school qualifications, or as a graduate entry degree to medicine or AHP/NMC.

Moral of the story - whatever you really want to do, do it. If you really want to make it work, you will.
Degree in 19th Century French Period Furniture Restoration? David Beckham studies? Perhaps not. But pharma is a solid degree that can lead onto many masters/PhD programmes, or as entry to BSc/BA/MBChB degrees, and various different careers and pathways. If it's what you want, do it.

"Those who say it cannot be done,
Should not interrupt those doing it."
- Chinese Proverb

Oh cool, and they recommend it?

Hi,
Pharmacists don't just sit behind a counter and dispense medication. You can go into industry (where the real money is), you can do community, hospital, chain etc. You can also work in research in unis or private labs or go into teaching and Independent Prescribing (which is really cool).There are so many opportunities.

Qualified Pharmacist here for nearly 3 years.
Sitting behind a counter and dispensing medication is community pharmacy, and so is 'chain'.

Industry is a very difficult area to get into in pharmacy and in my cohort of roughly 200 students I heard of only one that managed to get a job in industry; and no it is not 'where the money is'

Hospital pharmacy is paid much less than community and it takes years to go up the bands - and involves more work and studying even after you finish university.

Research in unis - this wouldn't be very well paid and would require you to get a PhD after you finish your MPharm - some of my lecturers were pharmacists with PhD's in Pharmacology

Independent prescribing - you have to work for 2 years after qualifying and then you need to do a diploma and find a GP to take you on for free so he can train you up. In the end you just end up signing off repeats that GP's have already prescribed in the past for patients.

The vast majority of pharmacists end up in community, I advise you watch the BBC documentary that aired on 8th Jan regarding pharmacy.

The government are doing cuts to community pharmacy and I have seen a drop in pay for locums. I don't know what 'schemes' are being introduced to let pharmacists make more money? Please do tell me because I could really do with some extra money right about now!

My cousin got glandular fever doing geography - there's no correlation between particular courses and illness rates!

You need to think about your life after your degree - a career in pharmacy would be so boring compared to medicine, where every day is different, you have to use your critical thinking skills to solve problems and interact with people.

A pharmacist also uses thinking skills to solve problems and interact with people

that would be limited to why a patient's repeat prescription hasnt come through or interacted with supplies people to get good discounts on nappies and toothpaste

Thank you for posting this! I'm a first year student on the MPharm, and I'm thinking about transferring to Optometry. If you were in my shoes, and knowing what you know now, would you stay on the MPharm or look at other career and degree options instead?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

A pharmacist also uses thinking skills to solve problems and interact with people

Thank you for posting this! I'm a first year student on the MPharm, and I'm thinking about transferring to Optometry. If you were in my shoes, and knowing what you know now, would you stay on the MPharm or look at other career and degree options instead?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Don't do it Izzy. Please don't. Yes, it's an interesting degree. But do you want to spent 9 hrs a day in 5yrs time working for a chain for about £16/17 an hr.??
It's bad now and will only get worse.
Watch on iplayer the BBC Inside Out prog on BBC1 on 8th Jan about Boots and pharmacist stress. It wouldn't be so bad if you got a lunch break and thirty quid an hr but you don't and you won't. There are about thirty schools of pharmacy and when you come to look for a pre-reg you will be fighting for one, all to qualify and be a slave for a foreign owned chain that pays peanuts and expects blood 5 days a week for 9 hrs a day. One day's work experience can't possibly show you what to expect. Unless you get yourself to a Boots or Lloyds or Tesco because those are the big ones that you will probably end up at at some point. And it's soul destroying with all the knowledge you will have to just stick labels on boxes all day. and be expected to do a load of useless so-called 'clinical services' like medicines reviews that only earn the company £28 for each one and GPs are interested in and just bin.
Do some more research and get some work experience with at least 2 big chains before you decide.

Hi, thank you for the reply, the way you describe the jobs I would be doing as a pharmacist does not sound ideal, but I genuinely think pharmacy is the degree I would enjoy the most. I checked, and once I've completed a pharmacy degree, I can do a post graduate and become a physican associate instead (if I cant get into a hospital pharmacist role like I would like to) do you think this is a suitable back up option? Also, I watched the bbc are pharmacists under too mich pressure thingy when it came out. I agree there does seem to be a so far unresolbed problem. Im just gutted because the course contents look so interesting

Doing pharmacy and then the masters to be a PAssoc. is certainly an option i suppose. But then why not do Biomed Science and the PAssoc course? If you did Biomed, you could then use that as a base for Medicine. There are many options. And only you know which is right for you. But it is good you are asking all the questions now. Go in with both eyes open and not like a lot of people do in August thru Clearing. Good luck.

Just be careful about planning to do a postgraduate medicine degree after BSc biomed - under the current rules, you would not be eligible for a student loan to fund this second degree (presuming you took a loan to fund the first). So unless your family are financially able to pay up front, you won't be able to do the graduate medicine degree.

Of course, if Jeremy Corbyn gets elected in 2022, then you might not have to worry about it, but there's no knowing what will happen in the future.

Hi, I'm currently a pre-registration pharmacist training in a GP/mental health split. I have been told in the past that I am very anti-pharmacy, for good reason mind you. Currently there is no cap on the number of pharmacy students (and therefore graduates) in the UK, meaning that we are seeing roughly 4000 new graduates each year with only 12000 community pharmacies in the UK, something that the NHS has promised to reduce by 25% in the next few years anyway so job prospects are becoming slim. As such, universities have started to use courses such as pharmacy and optometry as 'cash cows', IE courses where they can take on as many students as possible and take from each of them £9000 a year. For proof of this, look at the sort of universities offering pharmacy as a course, for instance Hertfordshire where I trained. The average pharmacist wage is listed as £35k a year at the moment, but I would argue that the level of stress involved is not worth the money. You have interesting jobs with high stress (medicine), not interesting jobs with low stress (stacking shelves at tesco), and not interesting jobs with high stress such as pharmacy, if you make a mistake a patient may potentially die but it is in essence stacking shelves and labeling boxes. So now, the actual job. You will be sold pharmacy by the university from year one, for instance reading these other students comments about clinical pharmacy and how there are opportunities within industry, there aren't. Industry will be looking for medics and pharmaceutical chemists rather than pharmacists on the whole. 'Clinical pharmacy' is essentially checking the medicines someone is taking whilst in hospital, you won't be expected to use your brain you will be using a book to check someone else's work, if this is for you then by all means continue in your application. Opportunities within GP practice are growing however you would have to be a prescriber to run clinics and this would only deal with ongoing chronic conditions rather than treating and diagnosing new ones, and you must be at least 2 years qualified before taking a prescribing course. A recent survery done by chemistr and druggist (a respected pharmacy news provider) said that of thousands of pharmacists interviewed, 83% would not recommend pharmacy as a career.My advice is to do any other degree (maybe apart from optometry). You will be told you are the expert in medicines in hospital etc, what your job will really entail is checking stock levels of wards and looking at computer screens. If you have a passion for communication and speaking to patients, pharmacy is not the choice for you as electronic prescribing is taking us further and further away from patients and more time behind computer screens. Please feel free to contact me regarding the realities of pharmacy, I have recently applied for medicine and should be hearing back in the next few months. Do not be duped by the course content, the job is far different to what they teach you.