It’s becoming increasingly more popular for Community Pharmacists to merge their skills into a clinical setting and become a clinical pharmacist. As you’ve specialised within a Pharmacy sector for so long, changing over to another setting can be difficult. There are however ways that you can go around this to secure your first clinical role.

Outpatient Dispensing Pharmacy:

Your first option is to secure a position as a community pharmacist within a outpatient dispensing pharmacy. This will allow you to gain great experience working in a clinical environment, typically a hospital. Through working in this setting, you will get familiar with the clinical pharmacists working on hospital grounds and their experience and knowledge will transpire to you.

Homecare company

Securing a role as a pharmacist at a homecare company is a fantastic way to expand your knowledge of clinical medication. Generally these settings dispense medication to patients who are outpatients or within care home settings. We consider these venues to be sub clinical.

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Training and Development

There are lots of free or reasonable courses you could attend with also act as your CPD training hours. If you can seek extra knowledge by yourself, it shows your future clinical employer that you are dedicated and willing to work hard to gain your clinical skills.

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Networking

This may seem very simple. However, to network within the clinical setting can open doors for you. Opportunities do come around for non-clinical pharmacists within a clinical setting. Having some inside connections would elevate your profile to them if a position were to become available.

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Consider a clinical diploma

We understand the pain in reading this! You’ve just completed 5 years of hard work studying and then we tell you to head back to complete a two-year clinical diploma. Painful to read, isn’t it? This is however a great way to enter the clinical word of pharmacy. This would be considered the traditional way to enter into clinical and everything else being untraditional. To progress in a clinical setting, you will at some point need to complete this diploma. During this diploma you will study different sections within a clinical environment. This will allow you to transition seamlessly into all clinical environments.

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This to be mindful of

Another point to be aware of is that you will take a pay cut if you transition from community to clinical pharmacy. This is because you are changing sectors and effectively restarting from the bottom of the ladder again, good news is that you can quickly jump up the ladder and make the jumps up the bands of pay.

The best way to transition is to try and get that clinical experience and knowledge in a community setting, this can be done in several ways as listed above, this will make the process a lot easier and smoother as you will already have a basic understanding of how it works.

We work with a number of clients that can offer positions that will allow you in the future to make that transition to clinical pharmacy very easy. These are either permanent or locum opportunities.

Be sure to get in touch to discuss these clinical opportunities with us- 01244 621477