Entering pharmacy school, many students only think of the community pharmacy role as the job they will end up in. As the years go on, new avenues of opportunity are exposed. The pharmacist has multiple ways to make a career these days: working in community, running their own store, working in hospital, working in hospital admin, working in research, and also taking a faculty position in research and education, not to mentino industry. The common aspect to all of these choices is that the focus should ultimately be on patient care.
You might not think about it as much in research, faculty, or industry positions, but all of your work does strive to achieve benefits for the patient. In community or hospital, the outcomes are seen firsthand, when you provide patient counselling, when you make an intervention to improve efficacy or safety for a patient’s therapy, the end result is that you are providing patient care. Coming out of school and soon to be out of residency, I find myself caught up thinking about where I will eventually end up… and the answer is providign patient care.
The bottom line is that we are health care professionals, and our job is to provide care that will benefit our patients, either directly or indirectly, through research that may someday benefit patients or education to future pharmacists. When considering committments, contracts, and obligations, our real only obligation is to provide patient care to the best of our ability, which I intend to do the rest of my working career, no matter what part of the pharmacy working spectrum I end up in.
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