Working in Healthcare🏥

"哇，你在医院做工啊？很好啊!"

"wow, you work in the hospital? That's so good!" 

"你是药剂师啊？铁饭碗leh，好吗!"

"You're a pharmacist? It's an iron rice bowl! Good what!"

Backstory: I'm an Australia trained pharmacist working in a SG government hospital. If you're keen on knowing what life is like as an outpatient pharmacist, feel free to read my previous post. Spoiler: We don't just paste labels on boxes.

Back to the programme, WHOEVER SAID WORKING IN HEALTHCARE IS GOOD, take it back👊🏻

Honestly, my parents thought the same, thus their decision for me to study Pharm Science back in poly when all I wanted was baking and culinary science. That's a story for another day🥲

Now when I share my work stories with my parents, they realise how bad it really is. 

"Wah, I never knew you guys get scolded by patients almost everyday." - Dad

"Why the patients so bad one ah?" - Mum

If you asked me before COVID, if I recommend being a pharmacist, I might still say yeah why not. Ask me now and I'd say, healthcare isn't for the faint hearted and try working part time in any patient-facing setting before deciding.

Yet another long post, so grab some tea or coffee or whatever, and let's go☕

If I were to look at it objectively, here are some pros and cons that I can think of:

✅Pros✅

- Staff Benefits: 21 days annual leave, 1 birthday leave, 14 days medical leave (this could vary, but these are from my workplace). That's 36 days in total, and if my math is mathing, you get about 3 days of leave per month

- Medical benefits: honestly can't rmb the actual amount but on top of that we do get some discount on some medications. For the ladies, there are some maternity benefits as well.

- Stability: it is a very stable job, cause we're always short staffed🫠

⚠️Cons⚠️

- Linear career growth: Most promotions and pay raise correlate to your length of service instead of your capabilities and contributions. Fun fact: I tried asking HR for pay raise, but apparently it doesn't work this way in SG. I used to request for a pay raise every year in Australia. All I had to do was speak to the boss and fight my case🙃

- Workload: People are leaving, we can't find humans to replace them cause working conditions aren't ideal. No one in the right mind would want to work in a toxic environment. Not the colleagues but more so the patients. So on top of our usual duties, we have other portfolios to juggle.

- Underpaid, overworked: For pharmacists, we don't get sign on bonuses (maybe for retail pharmacy but it's not significant when compared to other healthcare professionals). We constantly deal with patients, nonstop. We don't get to see a set number of patients per day, ain't nobody making appointments to get their medications. We deal with close to 600 patients a day, if each patient has an average of 5 medications (there are patients on 20 meds), that's 3000 medications a day. We have roughly 16 pharmacists working, so that's 187 medications to check per pharmacist. That's A LOT🥲

- Performance punishment: The name says it all, so the capable people start to get burnt out. I'm sure this happens in other sectors too. Lazy people who do the bare minimum get paid the same amount as capable people. The only reward we get for being capable, is a thank you email and maybe some recognition. Mate, I want a raise💲

- Mental well being: Obviously I'd save the best for last. I'd say that healthcare has done some irreversible damage to my mental health. Patients constantly berating you for things that weren't your fault. Getting yelled at just because they're unhappy.  Criticized for not doing our jobs (according to them). The pay doesn't justify the damage. Also, you could go for therapy (I don't get paid enough to) but if you don't solve the root cause, it's just a temporary solution🧠

I'm very fortunate that the pharmacy I'm working at doesn't have much politics (it's honestly almost zilch). And I'm so lucky to have great colleagues who are willing to put in the effort. It's nice to not have to worry about both colleagues and patients. That's probably the biggest reason why I'm still working here. I can't say the same for other hospitals and honestly for pharmacy, it could be a same shit different place kinda thing.

So there you go, the truth about working in Healthcare. Yes it is a stable job, but also possibly at the cost of your mental health. Unfortunately, a lot of the issues can only be solved by people way way wayyy above my pay grade. But if they don't see it as an issue, hiring locals to work in healthcare would be a hella difficult task🤷🏻‍♀️

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