The joys of med school

My boyfriend’s father is currently in the process of buying a holiday house in France. My day dreams of long and numerous holidays lazing in the French countryside were rudely dashed however, when I found out that over the next 3 years at medical school I get a grand total of 2 weeks off in summer and 2 weeks off over Christmas. Erm, what happened to Easter?? Adding to this, the nature of my boyfriend’s job means that he can’t take any leave off over Christmas and it’s very difficult for him to take leave in the summer months so we’re going to have hardly any time off together over the next few years :(. I wish money was less of an issue so that I could have spent this one proper summer break on long holidays and relaxing (like many of my classmates) instead of working!

Back to the real world

I’ve just come back from a 9 day holiday in the countryside of France. It was such a nice break!

(photo taken by me)

Back to the grind tomorrow though. I’m doing a locum shift with a company which requires all their locums to perform 2 Medicine Use Reviews and 1 New MedicineService every day. These are essentially services where the pharmacist sits down with the patient and reviews their medication with them. Sounds good in principal, but setting targets means that in reality pharmacists often end up doing the services on patients who don’t really require the service in order just to reach targets and earn the company money (the pharmacy gets paid approx £27 for every one carried out). Some days you just don’t get the patient’s through the door who match the minimum criteria to allow you to carry out the service on them, or the patients just don’t agree (are often too much in a rush) to sit down with you, so trying to reach targets can be pretty stressful.

This is the main reason why I dislike community pharmacy – it’s a business with the main priority of making money. Patient care is secondary and there’s always going to be conflict. I’m glad doctors still work for the NHS where making money isn’t the primary aim.