Why become a pharmacist?
What is a pharmacist?
Within the healthcare system, pharmacists are the medicines experts. Their valuable knowledge of how medicines work and how they should be used make them vital members of health care teams.
What does a pharmacist do?
It is the role of the pharmacist to ensure society uses and accesses medicines correctly and safely. Many pharmacists are clinicians, treating patients through one-on-one patient care, but it is also the role of the pharmacist to ensure that medicines are collectively used in the right way by a community, according to their unique needs. Pharmacists don't just help us take medicines, they also determine what medicines are available in the market, and decide who should have access to them.
At all levels of patient care, there are pharmacists. Below are a couple of videos that showcase our current students and graduates in different pharmacy settings.
Pharmacy is changing fast
Each year, nearly 700,000 Australians end up in hospital as a result of inappropriate or incorrect medication use. In response to this, in 2019 the Australian government announced medicine safety as a national health priority area. The World Health Organisation has outlined 13 major health challenges for the next decade, and the issues of medicine access, use and safety feature in four of them.
Pharmacy has a long and remarkable history, but it isn’t stuck in the past. As above, changes to the pharmacy profession have already been announced in Australia and all around the world. These announcements are in response to inevitable realities that will only become more pronounced globally; our collective ageing population, the variety and complexity of medicines, and the demand for better healthcare services as the world becomes more developed.
Further, as we all know, another factor that has greatly affected the pharmacy profession is COVID-19. As new diseases emerge and existing ones evolve, pharmacists need to respond with new ways to use and distribute medicines.
Whatever the future holds, though, one thing will remain the same: pharmacists will always do the sort of work that changes people’s lives for the better.