I have been a registered pharmacist in New Zealand since the end of 2020. In 2020 I completed my pharmacy internship at Tauranga Hospital which is a predominantly clinical based internship. Following passing assessment centre in November of 2020, I moved back to Auckland and started working as a clinical rotational pharmacist at Auckland City Hospital. Throughout my time as a rotational I worked within general medicine, older peoples health, stroke and neurology, paediatrics, cancer and blood, renal and liver medicine/transplant. In 2023 I transitioned into a new role as a senior medicine information pharmacist at Auckland City Hospital. My role predominantly focused on providing evidence based information to other health professionals, creating and maintaining policy and protocol and educating pharmacist and undergraduate students at the University of Auckland. I also maintained a clinical role working within the renal and cancer and blood teams.

No

A friend suggested this locum agency as they had used it in the past. I wanted to work with an agency that supported me to find the most appropriate role within my field.

Working as a medicine information pharmacist you are constantly working to deadlines. Recently I had a number of queries that required answering before the weekend which created pressure. In order to reach my deadlines without feeling overwhelmed, I created a do list and prioritised my workload to ensure that I could complete all my task before they were due. In this situation, I was able to complete my workload before the weekend and provide answers both verbally and in written format to a number of health professionals.

The act is an offical UK parliament document that defines the supply of medicines/drugs within the UK. It governs the control of medicines for both human and veterinary use including both the manufacturing and supply of medicines. It also defines the three main categories of medicines: prescription only, pharmacy medicines and general sale medicines.

I cannot prescribe medicines so I would explain to the patient that this is not within my scope of practice. I would then get in touch with the relevant team/prescriber to let them know that the patient was requesting this medicine so they can review and deem whether it is appropriate.

Firstly I would want to learn more about the complaint and get all the background information. Then, if appropriate I would apologise for the error/complaint. Following this I would try to amend my actions, whether this be updating paperwork or changing protocol. I would want to talk about the complaint with someone else so that we could reflect on the incident and work on ways to ensure it did not happen again.

Clinical governance is the way in which healthcare organisations work to ensure they are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services ensuring high quality of care.

Recently a patient's family didn't understand the need for the metformin their father was on, so they were supporting the father in not taking their metformin. They didn't believe they required the medicine as they were not seeing any benefits externally. When I realised this was the case, I explained to the patient's family how taking metformin will not lead to physical changes that we can see but rather internal positive effects, like changes in their blood glucose levels and HbA1c - things we can measure via a lab over time. Because this medicine was still relatively new to the patient, I also explained how it can take time for changes to be noticed, so being patient for a couple of months, in order to see results was necessary. It took a lot of convincing but eventually, the patient's family understood where I was coming from and decided they would support their father in taking the medicine for a few months until some lab tests were completed. In this situation, taking time to listen to their thoughts and then explaining my reasoning of need in an appropriate manner helped to persuade them to continue using the medicine.