Mike Hewitson explains what he loves about his role as a pharmacist and working in community pharmacy
“There is always someone that either needs or wants my help and that brings tremendous personal and professional satisfaction”
“I love being a pharmacist because I can use my skills and knowledge to help put people back in charge of their own health, whether that’s helping them to give up smoking, or helping them to manage a troublesome side-effect”
“My absolute favourite thing is building a long term relationship with my patients and community. Everybody knows me”
Sometimes I ask myself why I became a pharmacist? But it doesn’t take me long to answer that question – there is always someone that either needs or wants my help and that brings tremendous personal and professional satisfaction. Here in rural West Dorset where patients struggle to access a GP we are absolutely on the front line of the NHS. Some days it can feel like A&E in the pharmacy, especially on a Saturday morning when we are the only healthcare provider open for a 6 mile radius. This can be challenging but when you’re the only thing standing between a patient and a weekend in pain or a child with an infection it can be the best feeling.
When I have young people who might be interested in a career in pharmacy and they ask me what it’s all about the obvious answer is “medicines”, but it’s really about people. I love being a pharmacist because I can use my skills and knowledge to help put people back in charge of their own health, whether that’s helping them to give up smoking, or helping them to manage a troublesome side-effect. Over the last four years I’ve overseen around 60,000 successful vaccinations, from the peak of COVID, it was massively rewarding to be able to help grandparents get to their grandchildren’s weddings or to be able to travel to see family members they’ve only seen on a screen.
The most important tool I have as a pharmacist are two ears. As a prescriber in particular I find it really important to listen to what the patient is telling me is important to them because often this is not necessarily what the healthcare professional would worry about. I didn’t think I’d ever be a prescriber because to be honest I didn’t see much point in it, but through COVID I got to notice just how often people were coming for things that I knew exactly what they were and how to treat them, yet I was having to refer these patients back into a broken system to wait weeks to see the GP. That was a lightbulb moment for me, and I’ve not looked back since. I mainly see patients with skin problems because that’s my area of interest, but because we are generalists we can see a wide range of different conditions. I’ve even helped to detect serious skin cancers and get patients in to see their doctor much faster than they otherwise would.
Would I still recommend a career in pharmacy to young people? Absolutely, ours is a profession that is in huge demand because of the broad base of our training, and the increasingly important place of medicines in helping to prevent ill health and keep people well. Pharmacists work in all sorts of different environments from community pharmacies like mine, through to hospitals, prisons, pharmaceutical industry, research and much, much more. Medicines are becoming more and more personalised and we could even use DNA tests to find the best treatments for some patients. This will allow us to tailor people’s therapy to things that we know will work for them, and in some cases advise people on which particular side effects are more likely. When I started my career this sounded like science fiction, but it’s happening right now in some parts of the world.
My absolute favourite thing is building a long term relationship with my patients and community. Everybody knows me. When patients are told to “go and see Mike”, they all know who they’re talking about. People see me before they even think about seeing their doctor, which is a great feeling when you know that people both trust and rely on you to help them. The drawback is that I’ve been here so long now that patients I think of as children are starting to bring their own children in to see me! Apart from making me feel old, it shows the value of getting to know your patients, gone are the days that people could do that with their own GPs.
Sometimes you can meet some absolutely fascinating people in the pharmacy, I remember talking to an American gentleman one Saturday morning who turned out to be a NASA astronaut. This was the stuff of dreams for me and is still something I treasure to this day, I came across the signed photo he sent me just a few weeks back and it still makes me smile.
