Pharmacy or Medicine?

There are no 'easy' careers where you get high pay and lots and lots of autonomy. I'm sure you realise this, just saying it like, for emphasis.

I'm sure your Dad is very wise, however if he were a pharmacist or a teacher I bet he'd be saying almost identical things about don't go into pharmacy, don't go into teaching.

Personally I wouldn't call pharmacy a 'profession'. Yes, obviously it is in the legal sense, but I think this is where some of the frustration comes in. The public don't really take pharmacists that seriously. Most of pharmacy is in community pharmacy and much of that is in retail which is the wild west of pharmacy. It's a retail job. Sure it's a decently paid one. Sure there are some exciting jobs pharmacists do off in industry, which is very rare. There are hospital pharmacists, there are GP practice pharmacists (a cushy number).

Not sure how you come to the conclusion that pharmacy gives more long term employment options than medicine. Community pharmacy is going to have a lot of closures, a lot of automation and hours cuts in the future. Many would argue the opposite.

okay, thank you for the help, I'll keep that in mind. Out of curiosity, are you a pharmacist/doctor?

Pharmacist here,

Pharmacy at the moment is going through some uncertain and difficult times, especially within the community sector. As a pharmacist, you won't be going without a job, but it's the worsening working conditions that's the problem. Now medicine is definitely not perfect either, you will find many doctors such as GP's that are burning out.

Medicine is not just being a paediatrician, it has so many different options you can chose form. When it comes to pharmacy, the focus will always be more on the medicine side of things, that's what you'll specialise in and naturally that will limit your options compared to something like medicines where you can specialise on different areas ranging from surgery to dermatology etc.

It takes 5 years for you to become a pharmacist or doctor, before you embark on any of these careers, make sure you get as much experience as possible before deciding. Both these courses are intense and will require you to be passionate to study them.

The decision of which of these 2 courses to choose will ultimately by yours only. Nobody else can give you passionate needed to study these courses.

A dispenser riddles this forum with ill-thought 'advice' which is 100% negativity about pharmacy and pharmacists. The person in question is probably someone who couldn't pass the pre-reg assessment after multiple attempts, and hence, has made it his/her duty in life to discourage as many people as possible from being pharmacists.

@OP: Pharmacy is an excellent career. However, no career is perfect. I know of many of my doctor colleagues who constantly complain of burn-out and low pay, it's the same in some aspects of pharmacy. I'm a pharmacist who just qualified in November, I currently earn round about £60,000 whilst working 55-60 hours/week. I enjoy my job in the community.

A large pharmacy chain just announced it is selling off (not closing) 70 out of 500 of it's pharmacies. You need to ask, why?

The company I worked for has sold off and closed a large number of pharmacies, but done it pretty secretly, so it's not got the coverage it deserves. All of the big companies have 'fulfilment centres' - giant warehouses - where they intend to do most prescriptions, with stressed out pharmacists and techs hanging around with loads of robots. Community pharmacy dispensing is a devastatingly easy set of tasks to automate in theory, it's just pharmacy is full of technophobes and change is slow. Pharmacists will still exist, the good ones will get jobs and will always get work in community, but in 10 years there will be far fewer physical pharmacies doing far fewer prescriptions and so what's going to happen, is there going to be money for other services?

Community pharmacy is reliant on NHS money or a slight change on this and you go out of business. The NHS isn't all nicey nicey, it's a rough player and gets fantastic value for money for itself, but this has very serious consequences for working conditions and pay for people that work in pharmacy. Pharmacies do loads of stuff for free, like delivery where money is just whooshing out of the till, it's completely mingbendingly bonkers. You might say yeah but you make the money in other areas - no you don't, margins are very tight. The other notable factors on poor working conditions are big chains have massive downward pressure on wages, poor unionisation, vastly too many pharmacy schools in the UK for number of jobs and a large supply of EU, Indian subcontinent and West African pharmacists that all want to work here. All of these things conspire to make poor working conditions and static/falling pay. It's mostly 'too many EU pharmacists' and 'too many pharmacy schools' it gets blamed on.

There's endless promises by the NHS about 'clinical pharmacists'. It is in my opinion a complete crock of. Since 2010 there have been 6000 independent prescribers, that sounds fantastic until you realise there are 40,000+ pharmacists on the register and this is over years to train them and constantly saying this is the future. The NHS is always saying they'll be loads of jobs for these people and apart from an announcement recently it's not backed up by anything solid.

No. I was a dispenser in a pharmacy.

I could have done either, instead I did two other science degrees. I absolutely loved chemistry so I worked in a pharmacy for 3.5 years. I worked with a very large number of pharmacists, many more than some pharmacy support staff get to. I got a lot of advice to do a pharmacy degree, go into hospital tech and for a while I took that very seriously mugged up on a fair bit of stuff including funding, legalities. The funding system in pharmacy is the most devastating bit for me.

I wouldn't let talking to pharmacy staff put you off, talk to both pharmacists and staff. You will get some staff that aren't that interested, in the same way that you might occasionally bump into a 2nd pharmacist in a quiet leafy sleepy pharmacy that just nods and says a few good things. Talk to as many people as possible. Some pharmacists can be a bit funny and call us 'school leavers' lol, cheeky things, I have more degrees and years of studying than they do.

A dispenser riddles this forum with ill-thought 'advice' which is 100% negativity about pharmacy and pharmacists. The person in question is probably someone who couldn't pass the pre-reg assessment after multiple attempts, and hence, has made it his/her duty in life to discourage as many people as possible from being pharmacists.

That's quite concerning, so are you saying that there won't be enough jobs by the time I finish uni?

I'm not saying that at all. Times are tough in some pharmacies.

70/500 at Rowlands. Selling off and not closing. Some would say selling off means that they are 'viable'.

190/1500 Lloyds sold off & closed.

In the past (2016) the government said a quarter of all pharmacies could close. That hasn't happened which has led some people to say it's all hogwash, but there've been some closures in the city I live in. Closures can be avoided, for example in the main pharmacy I worked in hours were cut. That makes it more difficult working conditions-wise for everyone.

Talk to as many different pharmacists as you can. A couple of dozen at least. And spend longer thinking about it.

Do what YOU want to do, NOT what your Dad wants.
I would do some work experience in a hospital first before deciding. On my work experience placement, I spent one morning shadowing a Pharmacist and the rest of the week a Doctor. (Ive applied to do med)
Also, I would advise against shadowing your Dad (although I am sure he is super nice) it is better to shadow a stranger as you have more freedom to ask questions etc