Many years ago, in my
pre-reg year, I was pulled into an office by my tutor and told that I
needed to sober up. She didn't mean that in an alcohol sense, but
instead that I needed to start being more serious, dour, and less
quirky. She told me that my personality, as it was, wasn't right to
be a professional.
At the time, I believed
her. She told me that I would never make a good pharmacist if I
carried on the way I was. I was terrified, as all I wanted to do with
my life was to be a pharmacist. If I couldn't be a good one, then I
would really need to change my personality.
All of this started
because I had a Christmas pen. It played tinny music for an
alarmingly long time when pressed, and it became a bit of a joke in
the dispensary to sneak up behind me when I was working and set it
off, making everyone dissolve into giggles. A dispensing assistant,
who was wearing a Christmas tie, was also told off, and strongly
advised to not wear it again.
But nowadays, I
disagree heartily that you have to be serious to be professional. I
think a little bit of well-placed silliness and a lot of humour can
add to our professionalism.
We need to be
approachable to patients. And what makes a person more approachable
than a little bit of personality? Nothing, except perhaps a novelty
pen. On a couple of occasions, women who have come to see me about
the emergency hormonal contraception pill, and who have been very
nervous, have ended up giggling at a ridiculously fluffy pink
flamingo pen I used to have. It broke the ice, and they could see
that I was a person just like them, and I wasn't going to sit there
all business-suited and high and mighty at the other side of the
table and judge them. They felt a lot more comfortable because of
that pen, and I think I was able to help them a lot more as a result.
At the moment, I have a
Special Pen in my desk drawer. It is comedically large, pink, and
slightly phallic, with some floppy rubber spikes on the end. I like
to take it out of my desk drawer and offer it up, straight-faced,
when people ask to borrow a pen.
 |
| My current Special Pen. Banana for scale. |
We health care
professionals deal with a lot of dark stuff on a daily basis:
sickness, death, disability, anger, frustration etc. We need to
balance that darkness out with something lighter. Whether its doing
something daft in the dispensary to make your staff laugh for a few
seconds when times are stressful, or donning a fox mask and writing
silly things on the internet, it all counts.
As long as we put the
patient first, we treat others with respect, and we work within our
limits, true professionalism doesn't have to mean that we all walk
about with serious faces.
Hxxx
