EARLY career pharmacists (ECPs) who walk away from the profession seeking greater rewards in other healthcare roles are likely to be disappointed, Pharmacy Guild of Australia National President, Trent Twomey, believes.
Speaking on the latest episode of Raven's Recruitment's Your Pharmacy Career podcast, Twomey said the majority of health professions were undergoing their own challenges.
"Pharmacy is not unique and different," he said.
"General practice is going through an immense period of change, tertiary healthcare is going through an immense period of change [too].
"There are financial pressures in every healthcare sector, and there are technological disruptions happening in every single sector, so thinking the grass is greener on the other side and jumping the fence, I'm really sorry you'll invest all that risk, skills and training, and you'll wake up in five years' time in a new profession and realise you've got exactly the same challenges."
Twomey said that embracing change and pushing for pharmacists to be able to work to their full scope of practice, including the authority to prescribe and administer medications (PD 24 Nov), would be crucial to keeping ECPs in the profession.
"I want to retain talent," he said.
"I want a professionally rewarding profession, a highly remunerated profession.
"But we're only going to get those things if everybody changes, and that's from the pharmacy owners, the pharmacist managers to the pharmacy assistants.
"We need to embrace technology to take over a lot of those repetitive things that are contributing to burnout - ordering, stock management, a lot of those technical aspects of dispensing, so we free our time up to do those more professionally rewarding things.
"Those cognitive things that we've spent half a decade training [in] and obtaining - that's what will ensure not only do we attract the very best talent to our profession, but we also most importantly retain the very best talent in our profession."
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