Denis Ryan, MRPharmS.

I finished up with Barts and the London NHS trust about a month ago today. I got signed off by my tutor, passed my registration exam, and recently received my registration certificate in the post. So now that I'm a fully-fledged member of the profession, what are my thoughts on it?

I don't know.

It's been a challenging year. For at least the first half of it I felt overwhelmed by everything I had to learn, and only started to find my feet after Christmas. The amount of information I had to assimilate was pretty vast, and I always felt like I was playing catch-up. I didn't particularly mind this, I knew the learning curve I had to put up with is a feature of hospital pharmacy, and I certainly learned more there than I would have done if I was in a shop for a whole year. At the start of the year, I was as nervous as hell approaching patients, and it took me 20 minutes to extract the required information from them. Dealing with people when they're in that position of vulnerability takes some getting used to. Towards the end of the year though, I was pretty much dealing with upto 8 patients in two hours, and confidently getting all information I needed from them, with the minimum of support. I also got used to the ins and outs of a hospital dispensary, which is more than a bit different to a community one. I've also got some recognition for a project that I did while at the hospital, being asked to display a poster at regional level, and also won a prize for a presentation I gave with a colleague. All in all, I've overcome a few barriers and got some props. So where to from here?

See above. Returning to hospital as a qualified pharmacist would mean working towards getting a clinical diploma over the next three years. Not a problem, if it was what I genuinely wanted, but while I've managed to make a decent fist of hospital pharmacy over the last year, I'm still dubious about committing to it in the long run. I'm still not at home on the wards, and my tutor for the year picked up on this: We're both pretty much agreed on the fact that it's the technical side of things that I'm suited to. My main motivation for doing a hospital pre-reg was for the learning. I hadn't much of a clue about the clinical side of things, and I felt that whatever I ended up doing, I should start out by learning about this first. The jury remains out on whether I'll return to it, though.

So. On I go. I'd like to take some time out from it all, but I need to keep the money coming in if I want to stay in London. I've already spent some time locuming at a pharmacy at Gatwick airport, and that was a bit busy to say the least of it, but it seems to have passed off without incident. All I have to do now is find some more work, and SOON. Of course, corporations the world over are using the current economic climate as an excuse to lay off staff left right and centre, and drug companies are no exception, which is a pain, as I'm thinking of making inroads there. Well, it's either that, or just coast along in community for a while.

After our registration exam a while back, we all met up, and were discussing where we are going to go from here. I was relieved to hear that at least one other person was feeling that while he liked the course at uni, he wasn't too much into working as a pharmacist, and was thinking of returning to teach it instead. If there's one thing I liked doing this year, it was organising and presenting information and learning things from the 'ground up'. Hopefully I'll find an outlet for this in the future.

Other than that, London is cool, and I'm planning on hanging on here for a while. The only current fly in the ointment is that I have to find somewhere else to live soon. I've resisted the urge to move to the gay triangle of Vauxhall/Kennington/Oval. Somewhere west, like Ealing, maybe.