to be hospital pharmacist 16

A guide to rotations

First rotation 

You will feel a certain amount of trepidation when you start your first
rotation, whichever area you may have been allocated to. You have just
joined a new organization and are still getting to grips with how things work
and who all these people are. You are also unclear about other people’s
expectations of you as a pre-reg because you have never been in this position
before.

Your first rotation shows you very clearly how far you are from being
a pharmacist, and this difference is uppermost in your supervisors’ minds, as
they probably have just had pre-regs who were at the end of their pre-reg
training year and have now qualified. You should bear in mind that, for some
supervisors, it can be very frustrating to train pre-regs from knowing nothing
to practicing competently, only for them to leave and the next lot of pre-regs
to start from ‘zero’ again. This could mean that you are on the receiving end
of some frustration from your supervisors, although it is not directed at you
as an individual.

You may start your pre-reg training year with some degree of previous
experience, which in some circumstances can put you at a slight
advantage. But, whatever experiences you have had, you will still feel that
you are starting from the beginning because each hospital has its own
systems and standards. Even if you have done a summer placement at the
hospital where you are now a pre-reg, you will feel that everyone’s expectations
of your work performance are different from those of a summer
student.

Whatever rotation you start with, you will find that your supervisors
assess your individual knowledge and skills before they are confident about
letting you do anything unsupervised. At the start of your pre-registration
training year, this undoubtedly happens every time that you work with a
different pharmacist or technician. 

This could be very frustrating, especially when you are in a rotation, and your supervising pharmacists are themselves rotating so that, halfway through your rotation, you are 

working with an entirely new team of people who have not worked with you before, do not
know what you are capable of and reassess you, making you feel as if you
have to prove yourself again. Please tolerate this, because you must appreciate
that your supervisors have to take responsibility for what you are doing
under their supervision; in addition, be aware that, if anything goes wrong,
you may also be liable.

Later in your pre-reg year, you will probably be ‘tested’ less, which
means that people have certain expectations of your ability to do certain
things. At this point, it is up to you to be honest with yourself, and with
everyone else, about what you are, and are not, capable of.
It is useful to write some records of evidence from the beginning. This is
a good way of recording your progression, and you’ll be writing about very
different issues throughout your training period. One way of looking at
records of evidence is as a record of your CPD (continuing professional
development), tracking your own learning and development, and reflecting
on your own progress.

Another issue is how you show your supervisors, and ultimately your
pre-reg tutor, that you are competent. In a community pharmacy, it is likely
that you will work very closely with your pre-reg tutor, often side by side on a
daily basis. This means that the community pharmacy tutor can directly
observe what the pre-registration pharmacist is doing. In hospital pharmacy,
your tutor probably won’t work with you on a daily basis, because you are
rotating around many different rotations, but you need to prove your competence
to your tutor. 

This means that you must have some written evidence
to prove that you have done the things that you say you have done. Your tutor
will also rely on your supervisors’ feedback and assessment in your different
rotations, so you may well have appraisal meetings with each rotation to
record what you have learned. In this way, your tutor can build up a picture
of your developing practice and be sure that he or she is signing you off
appropriately.