to be hospital pharmacist 12

M A N A G I N G  T H E   B O S S

 
We would recommend that, in your early meetings with your tutor, you try to
find out a bit more about him or her in terms of what he or she does in the
department and how his or her diary works. The more senior your tutor, the
busier the diary will invariably be. It is important to find out the tutor’s
interests, for example respiratory medicine or pharmacokinetics, and then
make sure that you revise these areas because it is likely that you will be asked
questions about these areas in your tutor meetings.

If your tutor is one of the senior managers, it is worth finding out how he or she would like to support you and how often he or she normally sees pre-regs during the year. If your
tutor prefers you to come to him or her we recommend that you try to set up
meetings in advance, in particular around the time that you finish your
rotations and certainly around the time of the formal progress reviews.

Tutors with the busier diaries may prefer this because they are then committed
to seeing you at an allocated time; be aware that often their diaries will
change and they may need to move any meetings with you. You need to make
sure that you are organised and make a note of any changes to meetings in
your own diary. On occasions you may find that your meetings are moved to
a different time of the day, a different day or a different site; all of these
changes can get very confusing.

Once you have established how your tutor is going to support you and
how often you will meet, it is important that you manage this effectively
throughout the year. Remember that your tutor will probably be so busy that
if you do not see him or her then he or she will not see you. In our experience,
if pre-regs do not try to make appointments with their tutors, they can go
weeks without seeing them. When you do finally see your tutor, he or she may
not have enough time to go through your records of evidence, and then at
progress review time he or she will not have seen enough evidence to sign you
off. It is important for you to realise that, without enough evidence, your
tutor will not sign you off and it will be you who suffers because the tutor has
nothing to lose.

Many hospital pre-reg tutors will not work with you directly during the
year; some may work with you in particular rotations, and they need you to
provide them with evidence of what you have been doing during the rotation.
Remember that it is unlikely that your tutor is an expert in all pharmacy
practice areas and you may well be teaching him or her new things that you
have learned during your rotations. 

Conversely, you need to be honest with
your tutors in areas in which you have little experience or at which you are
just not very good. Once you have identified your weaknesses, it makes it
much easier for you to strengthen these areas during the year. It pays in the
long term for you to be honest and identify the real problems that you may
have. For example, you may just not be very good at seeing patients with
terminal illness and this is something that you may not feel comfortable about
disclosing to anyone else. Your tutor will either be able to help you by
providing his or her own experiences or may direct you to someone who
may be able to help you more than he or she can; only a bad tutor will leave
you in the lurch and not do anything. 

You need to communicate clearly with
your tutor and be clear about any problems that you may have. Don’t beat
about the bush. You need to learn from your own experiences in the workplace
but it is worth learning from your tutor’s experience as well.
In these instances it is important to provide your tutor with appropriate
evidence of what you have been doing. Most hospitals prefer you to use
records of evidence and some hospitals have devised their own paperwork
for this. 

You need to remember to provide copies of prescriptions, drug charts
or documents to go with the records of evidence, so that your tutor knows
that what you have done is genuine; without this there is no guarantee that
your evidence is not fabricated. Often tutors will check with others in the
department to see if what you are writing is a true reflection of what you have
been doing, and whether any patients about whom you are writing are not
actually in the hospital. It is not unheard of for pre-regs to write records of
evidence that are not true accounts of what actually happened, and they
claim that they did things that they did not.

It would be worth checking with your tutor how he or she prefers you
to supply your records of evidence. Some tutors prefer to have these a few
days before you are due to meet so that they can go through them before the
meeting; others prefer to have them during the tutor meetings and then go
through them during the meetings. Unless you are meeting your tutor for
different reasons there is little point in attending a tutor meeting with no
records of evidence and nothing to discuss. It is not uncommon for pre-regs to
appear at a tutor meeting with nothing to discuss – the only reason their
presence being because this was in their diary; this is very frustrating for the
tutor and is a wasted meeting, so try to ensure that you do not do this. It is far
better to postpone and reschedule your meeting.

Experienced tutors will be familiar with the requirements of the pre-reg
in terms of the performance standards and will guide you when claiming for
these standards in your records; some hospitals have developed their own
guides to the performance standards. Other, less experienced, tutors will be
less familiar with the standards and it may be up to you to ensure that what
you are claiming for is actually appropriate. There is a lot of guidance in the
RPSGB portfolios as they are set up in a way that provides activities for you to
complete in preparation for tutor meetings and formal progress reviews;
completing these activities may be very useful.

This is what the whole pre-reg year is based on and you need to make
every learning opportunity count for something. Your tutor can help you in
identifying learning opportunities and also provide you with support by
seeing if your rotations can be changed or made longer if this is an identified
area of weakness for you.