It takes a minimum of 5 years (4-year undergraduate degree AND a 1-year training year) to become and qualify as a registered pharmacist in the UK. I chose to train in a hospital setting for my training year and it was great - gained a good amount of clinical knowledge, developed communication skills and experienced significant character building. I will soon start a new job as a clinical trials pharmacist after practising as a clinical rotational pharmacist for 21 months (+ 12 months as a trainee). Even if I were to go back and decide again, I would've probably chosen the same path.
A few thoughts (not generalisations, just my thoughts)
- In contrast to my prior beliefs towards how healthcare services were run, interdisciplinarity plays a huge role. Open discussions yield good clinical productivity and allow for idea exchanges on a patient-by-patient basis - very rewarding.
- Taking on-calls helps with character building. I used to doubt this, but it genuinely improves.
- Medication adherence is a huge issue - both clinically and financially.
- Medication shortage is a pain (presumably worse off due to post-brexit impacts?).
- NHS is a diverse working environment.
- Work is rewarding.
- Many specialisation pharmacist career paths are available - e.g., cardiology, oncology, endocrinology, dermatology, weight loss, high cost drugs, ePMA, genomics ... (these were all NHS hospital posts)
- Career progression seems faster now. I've come across quite many people who reached band 8 positions within 3 - 5 years of their post-qualified years. (except for major London hospitals)
- Nowadays, job postings explicitly discourage the use of LLMs in job applications but encourage their use if needed (e.g., to support neurodivergence)
- The new batches of pharmacists (and other healthcare professionals) are said to be LLM-adaptive(?) generation - at one point my hospital trust banned chat.openai.com (for a few days). I have yet to witness any official AI use within hospitals but tasks like discharge letter writings and prescribing could be easily helped by LLMs in my opinion - these aren’t doctors’ favourite tasks anyway. I've read somewhere that Cerner ePMA (Epic - owned by Oracle) started implementing LLMs for such services (discharge summary generation) - may not be true.