to be hospital pharmacist 6

YOU, THE PRE-REGS AND THE WORKING TEAM

You will generally be with more than one pre-reg in your training programme
because it is very rare for hospitals to offer pre-reg places for one person only.
You may be in a team of just 2 pre-regs or you may have up to 15 others in
your team in a larger hospital; generally teaching hospitals tend to take more
pre-regs. 

Even if you are in a small team, you will be working as part of a
larger team in the rotation or area in which you are working, so it is important
that you understand how group, or team, dynamics can have an influence
on you or how you may be influencing the dynamics, even inadvertently.
It is very important that you get to know the other members of your
team because you will be spending the year together and may well be leaning
on each other in times of difficulty. 

You may never have worked closely with others during your university days where there is often competition among students, and the type of work and experiences that you may be sharing
during pre-reg are probably things that you have never experienced before.
In rotations, you will be working with the same people for a number of
weeks.

Before you get to know your team, and two people are still a team, it is
important that you get to know yourself first because, if there are any problems
during the year, they may well be problems relating to you. You need to
identify how well you work in a team, what really makes you enjoy the team
working aspect and what you really hate when working as part of a team.
You may well have said that you enjoy team working in your application
form for pre-reg, and said the same during your interview, 

but the question is:
Did you really mean it? 

A lot of people think that the ‘best’ role within a team
is to be the leader, but this is not always the case and there can be too many
leaders in any one team, resulting in conflicts and disagreements.
 

Some people are natural team players and others are not, however
much they pretend that they are. It is important that you identify this for
yourself because there is no doubt that, if you are not that good in a team, you
will be found out over the course of the year when the pressure is on.

You may want to ask yourself the following questions:

•   What do I really like when I am part of a team?
•   What role do I prefer in a team?
•   How do I feel when someone else has taken up the role that I usually have?
•   Do I need to compete to regain my role or am I content to let someone else have the   same role as me?
•   What do I dislike about being in a team?
•   How much individual freedom can I have to do my own thing?

Although these questions are not exhaustive, and certainly not questions
that you necessarily need to share with anyone else, they are worth asking.
There may be occasions over the course of the year when you find
yourself becoming distant from the team and wanting your own freedom
to do your own thing without always having to join the group and be a part of it.

Some of you may not be able to relate to this but others will. It can be
difficult to exclude yourself when you have generally been an active part of
the group. In any team, there is a commitment to work together at the start of
the year or rotation and, as time progresses, you may find that you need your
own direction. 

This is more likely to happen if you are in a smaller team
because you may be the exact opposite to the rest of the team. An example is
when the team go out socialising; you may not want to go with them because
they go out drinking and drinking is not your thing. 

How are you going to exclude yourself from this without damaging any relationship that you have built with your team? 

It may be that you do not care much about these
relationships because you are in it only for yourself, and you have no interest
in maintaining friendships after the pre-reg year. This is perfectly OK but be
prepared for the team to move on to other things without you if you are in
a minority. This is much less of a problem in a larger team because you are
more likely to find others to whom you can relate; larger hospitals have
more pharmacy staff, so you will generally find someone you like, even if
they are not a pre-reg.

In a smaller hospital you may find that you prefer the company of other
hospital staff or people with whom you are living if you are away from the
family home. If you live with your parents, you always have your family and
own circle of friends as well as mates from uni.