In the complex living environment like today’s, it’s no longer easy and sometimes impossible to go on as carefree as our grandparents’ era. What’s evolving out there and how do we anticipate our next move?

As pharmacists, we spent a good 4 years or more pursuing our professional degree, with another year for licensure training. Then we start to decide what’s best for our work life – it’s typically an “impulsive" decision at that split moment. Often, the decision is everything circumstantial than a careful plan. That is perfectly understandable and normal. We all will live thorugh the experience of choosing either to work in hospital or retail pharmacy, or to explore outside the patient-care roles, or perhaps to join the corporate world, or may be to embark on business, or even to further our study etc. Whatever the decision at that moment, one thing remains clear 4 or 5 years ago, ie. we all chose pharmacy because it is a profession that we thought accord us great privileges to help the sick, the infirm and the less fortunate in their health. That ideal hasn’t changed generations on. Those who choose to enter pharmacy school are still very much guided by that desire and ideal, I believe.

Once in the pharmacy school, these idealistic qualities will begin to put through real test; they will be subject to changes, adjustment, re-positioning over time due to our personal circumstances, experience, opportunistic events and what’s happening in the profession as a whole. The pharmacy degree programme offered by NUS currently is broad-base, modelled after the employment landscape that has seen us through the past few decades. We all know healthcare scene and policies have been transforming, especially so now at an accelerated pace under the current Health Minister; so will the impetus to transform the pharmacists’ training needs. Therefore, it’s so important and demanding for the existing pool of pharmacists to effect change, and more importantly, shift the paradigm in sync with what’s now and prepare for what’s to come.

This takes more than just knowledge-building and up-to-date information, it requires the wisdom and resolve of all pharmacy leaders, integrating the strengths of different institutions to orchestrate the first shift in the right gear; or else the wave of opportunities will pass us by; or worse, it could engulf all those who are unprepared and the complacent ones in its wake.

I'm 100% sure that I’m stating and repeating the obvious, but it is the significant first shift in the right gear that we need to be a full 100% sure in order for us to work together in unison. On behalf of PSS, I can’t thank you more than having you prepared to offer your thoughts, energy, time and/or ideas to help us do thing better; and last but not least, to continue to support us and join the PSS to shift the gear together.

Many thanks for reading and let's prepare for another year ahead!

Ng Cheng Tiang
President, PSS