Tom Simpson is the President, Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia and Executive Director, Statewide Hospital Pharmacy Tasmania, and has held positions as Chair, Statewide Pharmacy Executive Committee, the Tasmanian Minister’s Health Council and the Pharmacy Board of Tasmania.
Tom is a member of the SHPA Leadership and Management Specialty Practice Leadership Committee and holds a conjoint position as Senior Clinical Lecturer with the University of Tasmania School of Pharmacy.
Tom was awarded 2018 Tasmanian Pharmacist of the Year and the 2019 SHPA Medal of Merit, recognising outstanding contribution to pharmacy practice locally and nationally.
You can find Tom Simpson on LinkedIn.
Do you have questions about your pharmacy career? Then contact us or meet our team.
Tom Simpson is the President, Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia and Executive Director, Statewide Hospital Pharmacy Tasmania, and has held positions as Chair, Statewide Pharmacy Executive Committee, the Tasmanian Minister’s Health Council and the Pharmacy Board of Tasmania.
Tom is a member of the SHPA Leadership and Management Specialty Practice Leadership Committee and holds a conjoint position as Senior Clinical Lecturer with the University of Tasmania School of Pharmacy.
Tom was awarded 2018 Tasmanian Pharmacist of the Year and the 2019 SHPA Medal of Merit, recognising outstanding contribution to pharmacy practice locally and nationally.
You can find Tom Simpson on LinkedIn.
Do you have questions about your pharmacy career? Then contact us or meet our team.
00:03 - Promo Speaker (Announcement)
Your Pharmacy Career Podcast, proudly brought to you by Ravens Recruitment, australia's Pharmacy Recruitment Agency, spotlights the myriad of career paths available to pharmacists. Your host, Krysti-Lee Patterson, and her esteemed guests will be sharing invaluable career advice that you can implement at any stage of your career journey.
00:25 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
Welcome to your Pharmacy Career Podcast, where we explore the myriad of paths and opportunities within the world of pharmacy. I'm your host, Krysti-Lee Patterson. Today, we're joined by a distinguished figure in the pharmacy sector, Tom Simpson. Tom is the 2018 Tasmanian Pharmacist of the Year, recipient of the 2019 SHPA Medal of Merit and the current president of the Society of Hospital Pharmacists in Australia, with over two decades of experience in senior health executive roles throughout Tasmania, at the Department of Health and in the areas of e-health strategy and hospital pharmacy. Tom, welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to join us today.
01:07 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Thank you very much, Krysti-Lee. It's lovely to be with you.
01:11 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
Now to start off with, I thought you could maybe share with us the journey that led you to become the 2018 Tasmanian Pharmacist of the Year and the Medal of Merit Award winner. It's quite prestigious, yeah, if you could share with us that journey and give us some insight as to what inspired you to step into these leadership roles that led to these awards.
01:35 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
My intern year was the year 2000s, nearly a quarter of a century ago, and certainly when I was a pharmacy intern I didn't have aspirations to end up in leadership roles nor to win medals and accolades. That's been a lovely thing along the way. I guess I always wanted to have an impact and that's probably been something that's driven my career and like a lot of early career pharmacists. The impact you have is the one-on-one patient-after-patient interactions where you solve a problem that they have and as your career progresses you get that opportunity to solve bigger problems where you solve the one problem that might take you months or years and that solves the problem for thousands of patients so that they never have to have that problem again, or make systems better within hospitals. So I guess it's been a journey where I've sort of tried to make things better and have impact along the way.
02:36
Those medals were wonderful things to be awarded. In my intern year I sat in the SHPA's national conference in the plenary hall there and watched these other people being awarded the Medal of Merit and the Fred J Boyd and it was just completely alien to me that that would be something that might happen to me. But the Tasmanian pharmacist of the year is a lovely award too, because it's a tetrapartite award bestowed by the University of Tasmania, the PSA, the SHPA and the Pharmacy Guild in Tasmania, and so that had real meaning to me to be recognised by the sector effectively for having that impact on pharmacy services and medication safety.
03:20 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
Very exciting. I definitely understand what you mean when you're a student and you see these amazing people come in and speak at university and you just think, oh wow, am I ever going to achieve that? What inspired you to step into these leadership roles? Did you look at these people at university and think I want to be like them one day? Or was it just you just took role after role that kind of landed in your lap?
03:47 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Look, I guess it's kind of a combination.
03:49
On the one hand I had the people around me kind of telling me I should go for some of these opportunities. I think a lot of people don't know what they're capable of and if you've got a good network of people around you they can help guide you towards those opportunities. I've said in a number of settings just how impactful my wife and co-worker, catherine, has been on my professional development, as well as all the other aspects of life of course. But she was one of those people who really saw, I guess, potential in me that I hadn't worked out, that I had and would kind of egg me on to go for these things. But I think also it is having that bigger network of people that you can interact with.
04:31
I didn't look at those people and say, wow, I could be just like them. I didn't think I could. But having people like that, those luminaries of the profession, and just being able to be part of that network that includes them, it kind of rubs off on you when you see the way that these people think and you get the chance to interact with them at conference, after conference or whatever. It's certainly been hugely impactful on me having something that's part of my career, that's bigger than just me and my immediate impact to be part of.
05:07 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
I think that's great advice. I know the very first conference I ever went to. I was a pharmacy intern and when I was at uni I just wanted my bit of paper because I'd done another degree beforehand. So I wasn't interested in going to NAPSA and those types of events and I definitely underestimated the value that these events can bring you in your career. My first one was an EPP and it just blew me away and I was very inspired. I'm so glad I did, because I think that it definitely changed my trajectory and re-engaged that passion inside me as well for why I wanted to be a pharmacist.
05:48
So I think if there's any younger pharmacists that are listening to this or maybe you're a more experienced pharmacist and you haven't been to one of these conferences in a long time definitely would recommend to attend, even looking at conferences outside your comfort zone. I actually went to a SHPA event and I was a community pharmacist but I was asked to go on behalf of the PSA and it was a really valuable. I learned a lot about the hospital pharmacy industry that I didn't know and made some really great connections there. So I think sometimes you can learn a lot from outside your immediate network as well and by stepping out and interacting with different people. You're right, it does kind of rub off on you.
06:38 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
I graduated from my pharmacy degree not passionate about pharmacy. I saw it as a degree that led to a job and my next step was to get an intern job and to do that job. Passionate wouldn't have been a word that I would have used. Look at me now. It's kind of what I live and breathe, and a lot of that I can trace back to that very first SHPA conference that I went to, MM 2000,. Suddenly realising just how rich this world was that we inhabit, Across all sectors community, hospital, academia, research, etc. I thought I'd enrolled in a degree that gave me the ability to do one thing, and what I discovered there was that there's dozens of different things that I can be with this degree and this career.
07:24 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
Oh, it's very exciting Just when I look back to when I was at university to now, and that wasn't that long ago. But yeah, it's a very different place pharmacy. But it can give you so many different career opportunities which you don't really get that in other industries. But I know when I first entered the farms industry I thought there was only that the two ways to go was community and hospital, but I thought that was just to be a pharmacist, like on the ward or in a pharmacy. But now there's even within those two areas there's so many different branches you can you can go, which is really exciting. And I think that kind of leads me into my next question. I'd love to pick your brain about leadership and management within the pharmacy sector. And, yeah, where do you see the role of pharmacists evolving? I guess under your leadership at the SHPA.
08:27 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Leadership in pharmacy has changed a lot since I was an intern, you know, 23 years ago, the skills that your leaders would would impart to you were the ability to dispense a PBS script in a timely fashion and lots of process and procedural things. Our teams now are so large and we kind of understood understand now how you get change made that it isn't just teaching people how to do a task. It requires a collaborative way of working. It requires emotional intelligence, which is something that you know. That was a term that proves properly relatively new back when I enrolled in my pharmacy degree. They just started to do testing for emotional aptitude and emotional control in medicine and other degrees back then, and it's just become so much more important now that we are collaborators.
09:17
We work not just with other pharmacists and pharmacy technicians and assistants, but we work with medical nursing, allied health staff and, of course, patients to bring about change. So I think that's probably the most dramatic shift that I've seen in how we think about leadership. Shpa has recently partnered with a training provider to offer leadership training that's relevant to pharmacists and you know a huge part of the focus there is on understanding yourself, understanding others and lead others, whether you have positional authority over them or not, how you manage with influence and grace and empathy, to bring about change. So yeah, very committed to that journey.
10:00 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
When you mentioned about being timely, I just had a flashback to a pharmacy I worked at many years ago and it was all about timely awareness and they actually had a little timer on the baskets of on the prescription. So as soon as someone handed in their script, it was timed to the time and you weren't allowed to turn the timer off until the pharmacist checked it. Wow, that's quite the.
10:25 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Very intense I worked in community for probably close to a decade. I certainly remember that first conversation where, if we're at your pharmacy manager, it happened to me saying you know, you're just too slow, you've got to pick up the pace. I didn't know how to take that feedback at the time. It was part of the focus. It still is.
10:41 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
You know, we've still got to be efficient in our jobs, difference between efficiency and being fast for the sake of being fast to the detriment of good clinical outcomes. But I also wanted to touch on the emotional intelligence side of things and the understanding of others. That's something that I think is really important, especially in pharmacy. We're in the business of people and whether that's customers or patients, or our staff or our colleagues, and it's really important that we see the people for who they are, and I think the traditional management way of things is show up in nine to five or eight, thirty to six, thirty in some places, and you need to kind of leave who you are at the door and be this different person in the workplace. Is that something that you've seen a transition from? Did you have that experience? And, yeah, where do you see that leadership and that people, part of leadership having an impact?
11:56 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
I have a hard time being anyone other than me in the settings that I mean, for better or for worse. It's very important we are all the authentic person that we are. If you're coming to work and trying to be a different person, the odds are of getting it right under percent of the time. You know they're not high. You've got to be authentic to yourself. As an employer myself, you know I've got a couple of hundred staff. What I want for staff is that they can turn up.
12:23
We are in a healthcare industry where you've got to be a person who has empathy and can connect with people, and you know you can't do that if you burnt out yourself. You can't provide empathetic care to a patient if in your head you are not in a zone where you can feel what they're going through. We want people to be able to go home and have hobbies, have time with their family, recharge and come to work the next day as the person that they are, with the empathy and self-awareness and that understanding of the lives that other people lead. You've got to take that into the workplace, I think, whether it's a patient in the bed or a patient standing in front of you in the dispensary or just a co-worker who needs to be treated like a peer and an equal by someone.
13:09 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
That also ties into the leadership program that ANZCAP is developing. I'd love to understand more about this initiative, or maybe you could even call it a reform, a reforming of the industry. So for those that are listening and have not heard of ANZCAP, it's Australian, new Zealand Collegiate Events Pharmacy and it's a new initiative with this SHPA. And for those that are listening that I guess a community pharmacist they might question why on earth is the SHPA doing something for community pharmacy? But I know that the ANZO CAP program is based very much on what the hospital pharmacy program is, with the residencies and things like that. So, yeah, I'd love to understand what your vision is for this and, yeah, how is this really going to impact and change the future of pharmacy?
14:15 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
You asked me a little while ago about the beginning of my career and the fact that I thought I just did a degree that got me the one job, because I don't think. Back then we had a great way of describing what a career structure in pharmacy could look like. We all kind of understand community pharmacy. You know that when you apply for the pharmacy degree you know that that's one of the job options. But you don't know what the structure looks like and how it looks like to progress, develop and grow in that or any other setting. And ANZCAP is part of that answer. ANZCAP is saying here is a career recognition program that aligns with the personal development and the career structure that a pharmacist can have. You know so we've always known pharmacy. We have an internship and then you've got, you know, 45 years of practices and unsupervised, autonomous person. But the reality is more nuanced than that, isn't it? We always talk about now that first 1000 days of practice. That really matters and that's where SHPA invested in residency programs. In saying the last time you get really good, structured, detailed feedback shouldn't be on day 365 of your intern year. It's. You know it's going to still be there on day 366. And in fact it should keep on going and you build people who have lifelong ability to grow themselves, develop the skills that they need in their workplace If they have that ability to take feedback from others and feedback from themselves and integrate that together. And so that's been a hugely important part of the residency programs that we've run and accredited over the last six or seven years and that's performed the one of the main ingredients for the ANZO CAP program. So ANZO CAP says okay, you've got your intern pharmacist, your career structure on top of that, very much mirroring the medical model. As you go into residency and you develop the skills of a robust generalist with a foundational skill that spans pharmacy, you can then go in and go and be a registrar and maybe start to specialise.
16:15
Not necessarily, specialty means lots of things to different people. These pharmacists we still always have that general skill set underpinning. But there are certainly people who work in specialty practice areas and that can include hospital centric settings, I guess, like critical care medicine. That includes a whole range of other settings in which you can start to develop specialist skills too, like geriatrics and aged care, like transitions of care and home medicines reviews and things like that. So there's a range of specialty practice areas that people can develop in any setting and the next level on from registrar is consultant, where you can demonstrate actually the impact that you are having is so much more than the impact that you had on day one at your career. It's not just the individual transaction with the patient, it's a broader impact.
17:03
So ANSCAP allows us to recognise people at various different levels of their career journey and also to recognise the specialty practice areas that they've gained some of those skills and experience in. So I'm a fellow of ANZCAP and my specialty practice area is in leadership and management, but I also work with people who have medicine supply or dispensing, as they're a specialty practice area. I work with pharmacy educators who've got education or research or both, as they're specialty practice areas, through to clinical pharmacists in infectious diseases or oncology, who again have that recognition in those areas. So I think now what we can do with Anscap is start to say what does a career journey look like in pharmacy? Well, it depends on where you want to take it, but here are the options and here's pathways to get there.
17:53
If you know, in your fourth year pharmacist thinking, I would love to be an oncology pharmacist providing chemotherapy related care to a patient, you can now see what that career journey might look like and what you need to do along the way, and that can happen in any setting.
18:07
It doesn't need to be in an educational setting or in a workplace led residency program like you might find in the hospital. The ANZCAP program opens that up to an independent pathway that allows pharmacists to complete those educational experiences without being enrolled in residency programs. I think the lines are more blurred than they've ever been, in the best possible way, around what pharmacy looks like. It isn't just two non diverging, separate lanes on a highway of hospital and community. You know, as we start to blur beautifully in the middle around transitions of care and support for patients pre-hospital and post-hospital and do in-reach and outreach programs at that side of the equation, as well as GP practice and embedded pharmacists into aged care. It's not the building in which you provide care that really matters. It's the nature of the care that you're providing, and I think that's why Anscap is something that transcends what professional organisation you're a member of or what building you're practicing in.
19:12 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
I love that. I think that's so important and it's something that I've always thought about just throughout my career is, yeah, why do we segregate the two paths? It's one profession and it's yeah, it's literally just a building really, where you're working, but the clinical knowledge is still there. You're just applying it differently. And when I saw the ANZCAP come out, I was quite excited to see that it was available for all pharmacists. And just to disclose, I am also a fellow, which I did not think I would be a fellow. I thought a fellow was someone that you had to, like I don't know, have white hair and wearing long robes or something like that, so I was very grateful to receive that and once in leadership and management and community pharmacy. But I've seen that there's a quite a number of other people that maybe they've got theirs in mental health or room care management or what have you. And I think that's really exciting for community pharmacists because I think the career trajectory has just always been okay Well, pharmacist, early career pharmacist, pharmacist, manager or PIC, and then you're an owner, or, yeah, maybe you go to hospital pharmacy, but hospital pharmacist has always kind of had those, I guess, progression pathways that are quite well defined.
20:43
But I think the really opportune thing here is that whatever your passion is, you can actually apply that and that could be your specialty. So, for example, the I don't know if you know Anderson calls herself the spectrum pharmacist and is very passionate about neurodivergent people and from a personal experience, and I think pharmacists have this unique ability that they can choose their specialty and I think that's really a great opportunity because you can actually target it to maybe your demographics or the setting that you're in. So, whether it's aged care or hospital or even within hospital, you've got your different disease states and we're quite lucky that we kind of create our own future, which is really exciting.
21:39 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Look, I think wherever there's a medical specialty, there's a pharmacy specialty that has to align with that. That's how healthcare works now, and I think you know we also need to reflect the role of our generalists to not just as the people who are generalists, the true generalists and there's lots of them out there they make the workforce possible because we've got people who can put into any area and they can do anything.
22:06
And we recognise both the clinical generalist specialty and the non-clinical people who've worked in what we're calling meds management roles, which might be education or digital health or leadership or other roles that are not patient facing but are just generalists across the system roles. But I think a lot of what pharmacists bring to their specialty area is that generalist knowledge. You know I work with mental health pharmacists who work as part of the psychiatric trading team in acute health. They bring a very useful lens on what's the contemporary treatment for various different psychiatric disorders. But they're also the go-to for the medical team of how do we treat osteoporosis these days. You know what's first line for heart failure now? Because they bring that generalist knowledge of how medicines are used in patients that the medical team needs access to.
23:01
So it's really wonderful to see people being rewarded for the skills that they bring. Beyond just it being about for us as pharmacists having a career journey, it's also something that I think our patients value too. You know, if you are a patient who's booked in to a clinic to see an obstetrician, you kind of expect that they're a fellow of Ranskog. It's kind of a minimum expectation really, if you're a patient who's needing treatment for oncology, for neoplasm, you want to know that they're a fellow of that college and I think it becomes a public health thing that our patients also deserve to know that the person who's making the chemo or the person who's providing advice in that specialty area has the skills and experience that are relevant to the care that they're receiving as well. So it kind of ticks a lot of boxes for making it easier for our patients and easier for our pharmacists to know the impact that they can have.
23:59 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
I like that, especially the impact of what they can have on the patients. Someone once said to me you can have 10 years experience or you can have one year experience 10 years over and you're not growing, you're not learning and you're not raising the bar and pushing yourself. This is actually about raising those standards about the quality of care for patients. Is that part of the vision for ANZCAP as well?
24:30 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Absolutely so. We've got two pathways through which people can demonstrate the skills that they're developing and the self-reflective experiences that they're having along the way on their ANZCAP journey. One of those pathways is the traditional workplace-led residency-registration model and as an employer myself, I've employed people through residency programs where you take people on a two-year accelerated journey through residency and what you get out the other end is someone who's really accelerated their own personal professional development. They've got skills there that are now exceed those of the people that they went through uni with because they've had all that investment and feedback. But that's resource intensive to provide. There are something like 500 people across the country who've been through or are currently going through some of those workplace-led residency and registrar programs, mostly in hospitals. But the other pathway is the independent pathway, which says there are other ways of achieving those same developments, and we've built ANZCAP around what we call learning experiences Not quite the same as a CPD point, but learning experience is an individual, discreet activity that has learning outcomes and broken down into learning experiences, you do yourself learning experiences where you collaborate with others and get feedback and learning experiences that are assessed.
25:53
You build up that library of these learning experiences across all of the domains of practice.
25:59
As a pharmacist, you know, against the national competency standards and along your journey you'll reach the threshold to say here are the learning experiences that mean I've developed myself and I'm on to the next stage.
26:10
We do at the moment have a prior professional recognition pathway that basically, that is much more linked to how much time you've served in particular roles and that's because you don't just launch something like ANZCAP and Save of the World. Here's the new standard to meet. You've got to actually recognize. Well, 10 years ago someone didn't know that they needed to collect these learning experiences, but we still actually need to be able to offer a recognition pathway for those people. So we have what we're calling our foundation program, which is open until April, which allows people to get prior recognition for their experiences as a pharmacist and to gain that same recognition as resident registrar, consultant in those various areas, which is different thresholds to meet, but long term, I think the view absolutely has to be that the pharmacists that are providing that patient care can demonstrate that they meet the patient's expectations, that they're someone who knows the area that they're working in and has the skill level commensurate with that.
27:11 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
Obviously, I love that. I think that's so important Because, ultimately, at the end of the day, most people I speak to that a pharmacist got into pharmacy because they wanted to help people. It's having that at its core which is really important. As we wrap up, I would like to also understand, or pick your brain about, what you think some of the biggest challenges or opportunities are within pharmacy in the coming years, and how do you think pharmacists can prepare for that? So there's lots of talk about scope of practice and lots of changes coming for community pharmacy. Is that even affecting hospital pharmacy? I personally don't know. I'd love to understand what that looks like and, yeah, how can pharmacists prepare for these changes?
27:58 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
That's a big question. It's tempting to take a line from where we are now and project that forward and say we'll probably still be dealing with shortages and a workforce that's incredibly in demand, and I think those two things will probably stay constant for quite a while to come. Yeah, we are at a point of evolving our scope of practice and in the UK, of course, in 2026, every graduate of a pharmacy degree will be a prescriber, an autonomous prescriber. I think the mistake would be to say, well, let's just copy and paste that and do that here right now. I think you've got to go through that. There's a journey you've got to go through.
28:36
We've got a lot of expanding scope that allows us to expand our training structures and work with the other disciplines in parallel with that, but on the other hand, the health system can't wait for us to do that at a snail's pace. So, yeah, the rapid expansion of expanded scope. I like to think in hospital, we've got serious runs on the board here. One of the projects I was involved in 15 years ago now at one of the hospitals here in Tasmania it was around pharmacist initiated pathology tests and having a micro credentialing program for pharmacists to be able to order relevant pathology tests for a patient has been admitted. You want to know what their full blood counts doing, because they were on methotrexate before they came in, or you want to know their renal function. There's runs on the board there.
29:22
I guess the huge one for us is collaborative prescribing where there's now 11, 12 years experience in Australia of pharmacists putting pen to paper to chart medicines for a paper following collaborative discussions with medical staff, and that's now kind of swept the country. It's in pretty much every state and territory. Certainly in my home state of Tasmania it's kind of a routine element of care there to have pharmacists putting pen to paper on the drug chart and we've seen South Australia and also my state of Tasmania moving legislation to allow pharmacists to actually do that without requiring the doctor's co-signature and actually that step closer to the pharmacist.
30:03
Semi autonomously prescribing. I think the magnificent thing about those collaborative models, which we've seen success with, is just how they're kind of win, win, win, win, win in that when you have the pharmacist and the medical officer sitting down together to work out a treatment plan for a complex patient and the average patient who we provide those collaborative prescribing services to in our EDs, the average patient is on nine or 10 medicines there in their 70s or 80s. By the time they're discharged they'll be on at least one, probably two more medicines and they might have had three or four different changes to drugs or doses in between that. So we're dealing with complex patients, and so having the doctor and the medical officer sit down together and say what's the plan here and the pharmacist is able to inform that they then transcribe that plan, that's what the drug chart is. It's a communication tool as much as anything. Not only does the pharmacist get more exposure to expanded scope and decision making, the doctor gets upskilled as well. All of the doctors who have been involved in Victorian trials and Tasmanian trials by and large reported increased personal satisfaction for them, because in hospitals it's usually the junior medical officer's job to chart medicines, and so the consultant will just bark and order at them and say you know, chart them up, some ketament and they'll walk away and normally their job is to work out what that means. Now they've got the pharmacist to work with and who can help them to interpret what that instruction meant. So the patient so the doctor wins, the pharmacist wins, the patient wins. They've spent 10% less time in hospital. That's a lot of time for the injection of one or two hours of pharmacist time at the beginning. That's a lot of health system time we're saving and just patients' lives that we're returning to them. No one wants to be in a bed longer than they have to. If we can get them out quicker the better. And so by doing that work up front, everyone wins.
31:54
So seeing that now kind of ripple out and saying, okay, what does that look like in aged care settings, where we know it's hard to get medical staff on the floor, or in regional and rural care. So we see collaborative prescribing as kind of the forefront of expanded scope. We've got a lot of great experience there. I was able to show Mark Butler, a federal minister for health, and Emma McBride, the assistant minister for rural health and suicide prevention. They were. I was able to show them what collaborative prescribing looks like in two different hospitals In two different states, and the wonderful take home that they saw was that, yeah, the pharmacist was doing a great job and feeling really good about themselves, but the medical staff too was saying I wish I'd had this when I was a junior doctor, because this is a much better way of learning how to treat patients than the old ways. So those, those ministers really took home the value of the pharmacist input into that care.
32:47 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
That's such a wonderful, wonderful testimonial there, and I think that's really important because I know just in my own practice, when I've worked with GPs or other medical professionals, they do appreciate it and I appreciate that what they do as well, and so having that collaboration, I think is is the key, and it's only going to benefit the patients. So, ultimately, that's who we're here for and really, if we put them at the center of everything that we do, we can't really go wrong there. Now we're getting to the end of the podcast. It's been a great conversation and I feel like I could, yes, speak to you all day on many of these issues and topics and hopefully you'll join us again on the podcast or maybe on a future season or episode.
33:40
But I'd love to know what your parting wisdom would be, or your advice to a young pharmacist that is, maybe they're starting to feel not as passionate. I know I've been there and you said yourself earlier in the podcast that you were there as well, and there has, I guess, been some negativity around the pharmacy industry in general, but I feel like that's always there. There's always this really big high and this real low, no matter where you've been in your career. But what would your advice be to them as they move forward in their career?
34:18 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
Yeah, look, I guess just a couple of things that I'd probably tell my younger self. One I was in a huge hurry. It's okay for things to take their time and it's not a sprint to the finishing line. It's a career that's got a last 45 years, so don't be in too much of a hurry, I guess. Another thing is it's okay to take breaks. I've had two or three breaks outside of pharmacy where I've worked in other roles In my case in the health department, in digital health or policy roles and it's good to recharge. I came back to pharmacy and I had a renewed passion for what I was doing, so it's good to recharge.
35:02
And I guess, the final thing early on in your career, it's hard to get that first opportunity to show success. Success is a snowballing, isn't it? But you only get the chance to succeed if you've proven that you're worthy of it, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So how do you get that in? And I think, whilst it's good to be a nine to five worker and that's what I encourage the staff that I work with do the hours you paid for and you don't need to do anything more, but by the same token, it's also good to get involved and invested in things that show you're doing more, whether that's getting involved in professional organisations and events or projects in the workplace.
35:43
I was digging through my shed a little while ago and I managed to find my grade eight school report card and lots of things that it said have remained true throughout my life, including that I should take things a bit more seriously at times, but one of the ones that really rang true was a teacher who said that Tom is not a nine to five thinker, and I think that that's been a constant in my career, that you know, even when I was early on as an intern and then an early career pharmacist, I didn't stop thinking about work and the impact that I could have and, for you know, 90% of the time, fortunately, having success. You know, not everything will succeed. Failure is inevitable. It's happened to me probably as often as success has had. But that's, I guess that's a lesson that I've learned that putting your hand up, getting involved and showing the commitment to achievement very important.
36:37 - Krysti-Lee Patterson (Host)
The fact that you're giving that advice around. I guess getting out there and doing things outside of your nine to five, I know it's hard because you're tired and life gets busy, but I think it is important for people to have something else that they're doing, whether it's, like you said, if it's a professional organization, or it might not even be anything to do with pharmacy. It could maybe you like playing the cello or something like that, who knows, and having those other passions. But they can even cross over into your professional life and sometimes you don't understand it in the beginning.
37:20
But I almost find that other things that I've kind of done on the side, or career breaks or things that I've had, they've actually led me somewhere down the pharmacy path and at the time I didn't, I thought it was I'm going to go do something different, but then it kind of adds value later in the track. So I think that's great advice to not be afraid to do those things and try those new things. Have a look at that and sort of kind of map out a few things of where you want to be and where you want to go. And same for those pharmacists that are maybe looking to transition into something different. Maybe by looking at some of the other people that have, I guess, been awarded fellowships in certain areas, maybe you can speak to them about how they got to where they were, where they are, and you can get some tips from them. So thank you, tom, for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been a great discussion and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.
38:19 - Tom Simpson (Guest)
That would be lovely. Thanks so much for having me.
38:24 - Promo Speaker (Announcement)
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