So where do I think pharmacy in 2030 will be?
The year is 2030, the streets are busy, and one thing missing from every street is a pharmacy. Where have they gone you might ask? It all happened around 2009. Pharmacists were made to become Responsible with the option of not being present at the pharmacy. This led to a major change in the upcoming years. Pharmacists decided to use the loophole not to be present at the shop, with this evolving to them never being present. This caused a massive mistrust in the profession and a massive slip in patient care, and most importantly to the companies, profits. Pharmacists were starting to be forced to go to work but they decided they still didn’t want to deal with the stress of travelling to work, dealing with customers face to face and not getting their lunch breaks. They were enjoying the quiet life.
So how is the profession still around? Well a computer company and a pharmacist came together to decide how to get around all this. In 2012 there was the development of a Pharmacy dispensing machine or a PDM (a fancy cash machine pretty much). This resulted in most pharmacists converting their premises into health stores without any prescription medicines or pharmacy only medicines- they may as well still make money from the front of their shop. With the dispensing robots now common place, all you had to do was insert your prescription into the machine along with your id, and a camera would give a live feed to a pharmacist in a control room (usually in their house or at a head office facility) and would check the script clinically and legally, and then the robot would do the rest. The PDM had an interactive menu which meant the customer could ask advice on the medication, these were all stored on the computer, but if the computer wasn’t giving the patient what they wanted they could ask the pharmacist some questions via the live feed, but this would require a credit card to be entered into the PDM first for a counselling fee-why would we give up our free time for free?
With this effectively killing off the independents, the multiples took over all the shops. Converted them into their own type of health store and inserted the PDM’s at the back of the store. So what happened to pharmacists? Well most got a nice pay off from the multiples, and the rest joined up to be control room pharmacists. All they had to do was sit in a room and check prescriptions for possibly 20 stores. This cut down the amount of pharmacists needed and made the multiples a lot more money. It also meant that the two schools of pharmacy in northern Ireland were grinding to a stop, as over the years people realised with this new control room, only 1 pharmacist was needed for a range of stores rather than just one per store, this made jobs even more scarce than they already were and made the schools less appealing and students moved to other professions rather than the over saturated one of pharmacy.
What wasn’t realised was that the only keeping most of these pharmacists fit in the past was the fact they were on their feet for 9 hours a day without being allowed to sit down for lunch, and this new control room pharmacist began to become overweight and over the 20 years since it was introduced bred a new obese pharmacist. In the late 2020’s Alli signed a deal with all pharmacies to supply their tablet for free to control room pharmacists to help deal with the epidemic.
So where did the pharmacists who didn’t get the control room jobs go? A lot have moved into the museum business or moved into teaching the history of pharmacy at universities across the UK and Ireland. The museum business meant they kept their pharmacy intact and they would role-play with tourists how they used to act with customers. Some of these pharmacies still exist in rural locations as a tourist attraction. They are also good history trips for children at local schools as well, who have been raised on the PDM system of pharmacy. The rest either retired with their lump sums from multiples or joined the dole queue, hoping and dreaming of a job some day.
A possibility or just bad pharmacy fiction? Who knows?
Monday, 25 May 2009
Studying time
Yes it may well be studying time, but this inevitably means one thing, procrastination.
It's unbelievable how interesting things get when your supposed to sit down and study. I had convinced myself a year ago that I had finished my life of exams and I had no more studying to do. How I was wrong. I now have one final exam, my registration exam. Its the exam that will allow me to practice as a Pharmacist. It encompasses all of what I learnt during my Masters course at Queens and also everything I've learned this year(or to put another way, everything I was supposed to be learning this year). So in essence it's a pretty big exam. Now the one thing I have found most interesting in my time spent "trying" to study is my window. I've lived in this room for 12 years, and I never really seem to look out it, other than to see how the weather is or to see what is happening in my back garden. Every exam time however it becomes a portal to another world. I get to see other families and what they are doing, I can see the park(or some of it) and see the kids playing their games, I can see rolling hills, trees, houses in the distance and the sky. It's pretty normal stuff for an Irish window. But my imagination really does run wild when I look out my new "portal". I'm seeing talking animals, tree creatures, battles, talking cars, transformers, pretty much anything I've seen on tv, and anything that I can make talk will soon discover it's consciousness. Yes it sounds like I'm slightly crazy or deluded, and maybe I am, but I think this is quite a normal thing.
"Anything but", this is a decent enough phrase to express my feelings towards studying, I will check my facebook who knows how many times, check my hotmail, check my watch, mobile, the window, anything I can find for a distraction. I'll even clean my room, or organise my notes, cds, books, dvds. I become a pretty good domesticated animal in such times.
The one thing I have learned though over the past 12 years of my life in my academic career, is that when it comes to it, all i need is pressure. I know it sounds weird, but I actually enjoy studying when I get into it. Its a challenge. I have a timescale to work against to learn as much as I can, or refresh it, or to understand it. Whichever way it works, it is my tiny challenge for that timeframe. I will do anything to keep away from it, and postpone it, and I am awful for taking breaks every 20 minutes or every hour, depending on what excuse I can come up with, but when I can finally sit down and read and try to absolve the information in front of me, I do enjoy it. That is until I find out about a week or two later that I haven't actually taken anything in, and then I have to cram everything in as quickly as possible.
During my school years this wasn't the case. I think the main reason was homework. It kept it fresh in my mind. I was hearing about it in school, then I was going home and reading about it again and then trying to answer questions on this topic. This was constantly reinforcing the topic in my head, and meant I had to understand it at the time. When you move up into higher education this certainly isn't the case. The lecturers really don't care if you are listening as long as you are quiet, and if you don't do your assignments, its your life and down to you to get it done. So half the time in Uni I wasn't listening and then I was going home forgetting I was even in class, and then to come at the end of the year/semester and trying to revise was so much harder, as I was nearly teaching myself the material, when I didn't fully understand what I was learning.
Luckily somehow I managed to learn what I needed back then and get through and do quite well, and all i can think now is that I've started to write a blog, is 1) I can't believe I'm writing about something so boring and 2) it must be because I should be studying.
It's unbelievable how interesting things get when your supposed to sit down and study. I had convinced myself a year ago that I had finished my life of exams and I had no more studying to do. How I was wrong. I now have one final exam, my registration exam. Its the exam that will allow me to practice as a Pharmacist. It encompasses all of what I learnt during my Masters course at Queens and also everything I've learned this year(or to put another way, everything I was supposed to be learning this year). So in essence it's a pretty big exam. Now the one thing I have found most interesting in my time spent "trying" to study is my window. I've lived in this room for 12 years, and I never really seem to look out it, other than to see how the weather is or to see what is happening in my back garden. Every exam time however it becomes a portal to another world. I get to see other families and what they are doing, I can see the park(or some of it) and see the kids playing their games, I can see rolling hills, trees, houses in the distance and the sky. It's pretty normal stuff for an Irish window. But my imagination really does run wild when I look out my new "portal". I'm seeing talking animals, tree creatures, battles, talking cars, transformers, pretty much anything I've seen on tv, and anything that I can make talk will soon discover it's consciousness. Yes it sounds like I'm slightly crazy or deluded, and maybe I am, but I think this is quite a normal thing.
"Anything but", this is a decent enough phrase to express my feelings towards studying, I will check my facebook who knows how many times, check my hotmail, check my watch, mobile, the window, anything I can find for a distraction. I'll even clean my room, or organise my notes, cds, books, dvds. I become a pretty good domesticated animal in such times.
The one thing I have learned though over the past 12 years of my life in my academic career, is that when it comes to it, all i need is pressure. I know it sounds weird, but I actually enjoy studying when I get into it. Its a challenge. I have a timescale to work against to learn as much as I can, or refresh it, or to understand it. Whichever way it works, it is my tiny challenge for that timeframe. I will do anything to keep away from it, and postpone it, and I am awful for taking breaks every 20 minutes or every hour, depending on what excuse I can come up with, but when I can finally sit down and read and try to absolve the information in front of me, I do enjoy it. That is until I find out about a week or two later that I haven't actually taken anything in, and then I have to cram everything in as quickly as possible.
During my school years this wasn't the case. I think the main reason was homework. It kept it fresh in my mind. I was hearing about it in school, then I was going home and reading about it again and then trying to answer questions on this topic. This was constantly reinforcing the topic in my head, and meant I had to understand it at the time. When you move up into higher education this certainly isn't the case. The lecturers really don't care if you are listening as long as you are quiet, and if you don't do your assignments, its your life and down to you to get it done. So half the time in Uni I wasn't listening and then I was going home forgetting I was even in class, and then to come at the end of the year/semester and trying to revise was so much harder, as I was nearly teaching myself the material, when I didn't fully understand what I was learning.
Luckily somehow I managed to learn what I needed back then and get through and do quite well, and all i can think now is that I've started to write a blog, is 1) I can't believe I'm writing about something so boring and 2) it must be because I should be studying.
Home
Ok, so by no standards would i ever count myself a home bird. I'm usually spending more time dreaming or planning how to get out of the country other than thinking of being here. But today while flying home from a week in Bulgaria, was the first time I've ever thought "YAY home!" and I've spent 3 months in america on 2 separate occasions and been to many other countries for a longer length of time. I don't know why i was happy to be back in the country i was born in. To me the word "home" is a strange concept. Yes i have moved around a lot, and I've always called home the place where I am currently living. I don't feel a massive affinity to it like other people i know do. I've always argued the point that home will be where I end up, be it in another country, or another town. I have no massive urge to spend the rest of my life in northern ireland or ireland, or anywhere else. I feel more liberated with the fact i could live anywhere, i could end up in australia, new zealand, canada(yes all english speaking countries, but thats all i can deal with due to my ignorance of languages). At the moment i should be in north state new york at a summer camp, that is where my home is during the summer, and it pains me not to be there, but so far i've had an incredible summer, with dublin, salou, my mums wedding, and bulgaria all being involved. To date i can say i have counted 4 places my home due to my mum, and 4 places home due to university and 1 summer camp home. Which to me i think possibly dilutes the word and makes it have less of an impact for me. Yes i think i fit in here in northern ireland, as i know our ways and i know how to act. But there is definitely something else out there. I always thought i should of been born in america, and therefore ive always dreamt of living there.
What makes home? other than a place you feel comfortable, you have the people you care around you and your happiness. Yes that could mean where your extended family live, but to me that just means a house anywhere in the world, where i have my wife and kids(if i'm lucky) and a job and a good circle of friends. I have met people who find that concept hard, but i know when and if i do come back to ireland, that my family and real friends will always be here for me. Some might say absence makes the heart grow fonder, i say it makes it grow stronger. I don't know what life holds in store for me, but what i do know is, no matter where i am, i'll be home
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