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Jennifer Richardson reports.
My pharmacy life
Lloydspharmacy’s Asif Sharif reveals to Jennifer Richardson his career path from pre-reg to online pharmacist
I’m the chief pharmacist at Lloydspharmacy online, where we aim to provide all the services we possibly can that you’d get in a high street pharmacy. We have a full dispensing contract, offering NHS dispensing and a prescription collection service through Royal Mail. And we sell all the things you’d find in a normal pharmacy – your GSL and pharmacy medicines.
I have to look at all requests and decide whether we should sell things – it’s safe and ethical. Customers always get contact from us when they place an order, giving them my contact details, and in probably one in four sales the customer will get an email asking for further information. I’m the only pharmacist on duty at any time – when I’m not here, we have locum cover.
We also offer an online doctor service, where people can log on from the comfort of their own homes and have a consultation with a doctor. The doctor will securely email us a prescription, we send the medicines out to the patient, and they should get them the next day.
I did my pre-reg with Lloydspharmacy and then took a position with The Co-operative Pharmacy as pharmacy manager, as I was keen to go straight in to management. I wanted to see everything I possibly could in community pharmacy, so I then decided to locum – and over the next two years I worked in a variety of settings. It worked, because I saw so many different strategies.
I decided to take this role at Lloydspharmacy online because it was unusual and challenging, and would let me see pharmacy across the UK. It was totally unique from anything I’d seen before, but it was still a community pharmacy – just using the online medium – so I leapt at the chance and have not looked back since. It’s been 16 months now.
It was unusual at first because you can’t make eye contact with the customer or judge their body language on the phone, but I quickly learned to adapt to that, choosing my style of questioning so I get everything I need – it’s like having a virtual customer in front of you.
There’s no typical day here – but we do have our bread and butter services, everything’s very organised and we have strict deadlines to meet. We have a rapidly growing NHS trade. Our hours are 9am to 6pm, very similar to a high street pharmacy – though we’re very lucky here because everybody gets a lunch break. People use the internet 24 hours a day, so to meet customers’ needs we’ll look to expand our hours, particularly in the evening – if demand is there we’ll grow to meet it.
The more weird and wonderful activities that pop up are those from abroad or uncommon medicines – the unusual requests are probably my favourite parts of the job. People come to us on the website, when they wouldn’t walk into a pharmacy and ask for these things, because they feel more comfortable doing so. The dull but necessary tasks are checking orders and stock counts – the things that need to be done but aren’t particularly fun.
There have been many highlights in this role. One of the things I’m most proud of here is that we work with head office to look at new services before we launch them and give feedback to help iron out any issues. One of the things we have done recently is with the swine flu pandemic – we wanted to dispense Tamiflu to patients in advance of need, which required a completely new computer programme and a completely new way of dispensing. In the initial wave we dispensed 1,000 doses in a couple of days – a huge success.
Also the launch of Alli as a pharmacy medicine was very successful after we worked with head office to work out what I needed as a pharmacist to feel safe and comfortable with the sale. Being consulted on things, influencing decisions at head office and seeing things implemented is very rewarding.
I have no plans to go back into a high street pharmacy at the moment because I’m enjoying what I’m doing so much, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
I am motivated by achieving things that haven’t been done before. When people ask me what I do, at things like branch meetings, they’re taken aback and very interested, and I often end up with a crowd of pharmacists around me asking questions – it’s very enjoyable talking about my role.
My ambitions are to develop and grow as much as I can as a pharmacist, and build this business further. Hopefully, I will achieve things that are recognised by my peers across the field, but for now I’m very happy with my role.