— By: Shane Anne Indias
December 11, 2019

“Anong ginagawa ng Pharmacist? Nagtitinda ng gamot?”

There are questions we repeatedly encounter from the first day of school in the BS Pharmacy program, even until the posting of our tarpaulins when we finally pass the board exam, even until today. If you’re not sacrificing your nightlife for work in the        hospital, or you don’t sacrifice your whole weekend for work in the manufacturing company, then you are just the so-called “glorified salesperson”, in Leigh man’s term,“tindera sa botika”.

An article from Collins published in October 2013 states that many people have that for long thought that the only skill of the    pharmacists is to read and decode the doctor’s illegible handwriting. Pharmacists have always been seen as glorified salespersons because the work of pharmacists is to dispense over-the-counter medication (Collins Mwai, 2013).

Are we involved? Should we care?

This perspective is very common in this country. This was believed to be the      superficial root cause of “brain drain” in which high percentage of pharmacy graduates in the Philippines prefer to migrate to other countries not just for the rate of salary but also to gain proper acknowledgment as what they deserve and not just to be simply recognized as a glorified salesperson. Imagine you are dreaming of being called a doctor as what other countries recognize their pharmacists but you end up being simply recognized as a salesperson with diploma and licence. This is a great concern for pharmacy professionals and pharmacy students because life in the pharmacy course is not normal. It is not rudimentary to encounter hundreds and thousands of medical terms, level-up computations that are sensitive to wrong answers because every single thing always deals with the life of people, different counseling points in every medication, different mode of actions of every tablets, capsule, and other dosage forms, hundreds of toxicities and their respective treatments, memorizing by heart all the standard guidelines in practice, and so much more.

Pharmacy profession branches different fields to choose from, community, hospital, pharmaceutical industry, and even in academe and business management, that pharmacists have become an integral provider of healthcare products and services.         However, despite this vital role, the majority of the public still perceive us with a        nameplate on our uniform saying  “I am just a  glorified salesperson”. This is no surprise that as time passes by, graduates of BS Pharmacy became fewer and fewer because students even failed to recognize the enormous mainstream of opportunities a degree of pharmacy unlocks.

I am not just a Future Pharmacist, I am a Pharmacist of the Future!

Ask yourselves, after how many years in college, do you deserve this perception

Of course not! Who would have wanted to be known as a shopkeeper with a diploma and    license? After all we’ve been through during   college, after all the failures and breakdowns, after all the things we let go just to pass the quizzes and exams, even our health that we began not to prioritize, after all these rocky mountains we’ve been through for 4, 5, 6, and so many years, nobody wants to have a nameplate on the eyes of the public saying “I am a glorified salesperson”.

The role of the pharmacists is not limited in dispensing medications, standing in a store for long hours waiting for the shift to end. Pharmacists ensure that patients get quality health services and products. Pharmacists are also engaged in research, academe, manufacturing or any branches of the  profession.  These branches the fact that  pharmacy as a profession and discipline is strongly entangled and consolidated by both   fundamental and applied science to solve real-world problems encountered particularly within the healthcare setting. The Pharmacy course is empowered with loads of opportunities and not just limited to work in a small drugstore.  

The Pharmacy course highly aims to equip graduates who are good at problem-solving and decision-making and innovative thinkers as the creator of ideas.