Hospital Cancer Pharmacist, United Kingdom

In recent years, more jobs have become available for pharmacists in the UK, including working in GP practices. This provides a better work-life balance as there is no requirement to work weekends, overtime, or cover on-call shifts. As a result, many pharmacists who come to train in hospitals move to GP practices. This often results in three to four rounds of advertising and interviewing for one hospital pharmacy job post, effectively leaving the post vacant for more than a year.

Cancer Services is also a speciality that is not chosen very often by junior rotational pharmacists, as the intricacies of cancer and chemotherapy feel too "complex" and advanced for a junior pharmacist. We have tried to alleviate this by rotating juniors through cancer services and have managed to retain some staff in that way.

Furthermore, in an already understaffed cancer pharmacy team, it is difficult to carve out the necessary time to provide proper education and training. As a result, juniors have a poor experience and retaining them is more difficult.

Separately, we are experiencing a lack of funding for service expansion. And what funding there is does not keep up with the speed by which the NHS approves new drugs and technologies. This often leads to more chemotherapy orders without consideration that the pharmacy workforce will subsequently need to be expanded to safely provide these services. Typically, NHS funding gets absorbed in medical and nursing staff, without the equivalent investment in pharmacists and allied health professionals.

Another issue over the last few years has been the training of pharmacy technicians in aseptic services. We do not have a sufficient number of juniors to join aseptic services, essentially causing a workforce crisis within a hospital's chemotherapy production. As a result, pharmacists often find themselves supporting technical duties. This creates low job satisfaction as the pharmacist  want to be clinical and patient facing. In turn, this leads to poor retention of pharmacists, poor working conditions due to job pressures, and increased stress levels, increased long term sickness, and an increased number of pharmacy professionals looking for a better work-life balance outside cancer services.

Several initiatives have been employed to alleviate the above, but it very much feels that we are currently losing more staff than we're retaining them.