Ciara Long (formerly Ní Faoláin), Senior Pharmacist, Bon Secours Hospital Cork, gives valuable insights into the formative experiences that can happen when building a career in pharmacy
I was out recently, celebrating four fantastic students who’d just finished placement with us. They were due to sit their exams in three weeks, and talking to them over the evening, what struck me wasn’t their competence – that was obvious – it was how nervous they were about what comes after it. Not the exams themselves, but the bit beyond: Becoming a professional, ‘adulting’, as one of them put it, in a career where they aren’t yet sure they understood the shape of.
It brought me back to exactly that same feeling in myself, years ago, and if I’m honest, it’s never fully gone away. So this is for them, and for anyone else about to sit those exams wondering if everyone else has it more figured out than they do: A look back at what an unplanned, fairly wobbly pharmacy career has actually contained, in case it’s of some small comfort to see the shape of it in advance.
Looking back at my own register entry, which stretches back to 2014, I’ve barely spent two consecutive years doing the same kind of work. Locum shifts, methadone and needle exchange services, a rural community pharmacy I was somehow trusted to run, a mass vaccination programme, hospital wards, an oncology aseptic unit, a lecture theatre, and now a national policy panel. None of that was a grand plan. Most of it happened because a previous plan fell through, or because I said ‘yes’ to something slightly terrifying before I’d fully thought it through.
Starting over, twice
Like most of us, I started in community pharmacy. I trained in the UK – pre-registration at Leicester Royal Infirmary – and when I came back to Cork afterwards, I had no professional network here at all. I spent those early months quite literally handing out my business card, trying to establish myself in a city where nobody yet knew who I was, and plenty of people looked at me like I’d handed them a flyer for a nightclub. It’s not a glamorous start, but it’s an honest one, and I suspect it’s more common than most of us admit.
What followed was several years as a locum, working across more than 20 different pharmacies in Cork and a couple more in Waterford. Locum work doesn’t give much credit as a formative experience, but it teaches you things no single site can: How 20 different pharmacies each solve the same problem differently, how quickly you have to earn a team’s trust with no track record to point to, and how much variation exists in something as apparently standardised as dispensing – I could probably still draw you a map of where the paracetamol lives in about 15 different shops, and not one of them agrees with another.
During those same years, I worked as a support pharmacist in methadone and needle exchange services at South Terrace and North Main Street. It’s not the first thing people associate with community pharmacy, but it shaped how I think about patient care more than almost anything since – meeting people without judgement, at whatever point they’re at, is a skill that transfers into every clinical setting I’ve worked in since.
Statutory responsibility, early
I became Superintendent Pharmacist of a rural community pharmacy in Mitchelstown in 2018. Nobody quite tells you, when you take on that kind of statutory responsibility, that it isn’t just clinical decisions – it’s the fire alarm, the till discrepancy, the delivery that didn’t arrive, and the occasional very irate customer, all landing on your desk in the same afternoon. I was, by any honest account, thrown in at the deep end. And then Covid-19 arrived, which is a fairly spectacular way to find out what you’re actually capable of. I found myself redesigning standard operating procedures, running staff training, and engaging with the Irish Pharmacy Union on national community pharmacy guidance, mostly while trying not to let on how much I was figuring out as I went.
Joining the Fight Against Covid
In 2021 I left my supervising role in Mitchelstown to contribute directly to the pandemic response, taking up a post as on-site pharmacy lead for the HSE’s Covid-19 mass vaccination programme at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Over 100,000 vaccines went through that centre while I was there, and I spent a lot of it slightly terrified I’d be the reason a cold chain failed somewhere. It didn’t. But I learned an enormous amount about logistics, audit, and staying calm in a stadium concourse full of nervous people – none of which featured anywhere on my pharmacy degree.
Into hospital – and a very different kind of fear
When the vaccination centre wound down later that year, I started my hospital journey with Cork University Hospital. A rotating clinical role took me through surgical wards, short-stay medical wards, the clozapine clinic alongside mental health services, and TPN provision – every rotation its own small re-learning of how to not feel like the newest, least useful person in the room.
From there I moved into oncology and aseptic services, which is its own specialism in every sense – GMP-compliant compounding, hazardous drug handling, and the kind of exacting risk management where a small error isn’t a rework or an awkward phone call, it’s someone’s chemotherapy. I won’t pretend that fear ever entirely goes away, and I’ve come to think that’s probably the point – a healthy dread of getting it wrong is most of what keeps a service like that safe. What I can say is that the unit I was part of got measurably better at what it did while I was there, and that felt like the best answer to the fear I had going in.
Teaching the next cohort
For two-and-a-half years I also lectured at UCC’s School of Pharmacy, teaching undergraduates about substance misuse, methadone maintenance, and needle exchange. Standing at the top of the room, I was fairly sure at least half the class assumed I had it all figured out. I did not, and still don’t, most days – but it did remind me how little of pharmacy’s real breadth gets communicated during the degree itself. Students learn pharmacology and dispensing competence in enormous depth. They rarely hear, from someone who’s actually lived it, that one career can wander through community, hospital, oncology, a classroom, and a policy table without ever leaving the profession.
Where it’s led: Policy and stewardship
Most recently, that same habit of saying ‘yes’ has pulled me toward national-level work – a seat on the PSI Pharmacist Panel, involvement in antimicrobial stewardship through PAMS-Net, and completing the Common Conditions Service prescribing training, one of the bigger expansions of what pharmacists are trusted to do in this country. I still occasionally sit in meetings surrounded by more acronyms than actual sentences and wonder how I ended up there. None of it was visible to me as a new graduate. I didn’t know pharmacists sat on regulatory panels, or that clinical practice and writing for a living could sit in the same career, until I was already well into mine.
On rejection, and changing lanes
Earlier this year, a national-level opportunity I’d been genuinely excited about didn’t come through for me, for reasons entirely outside my control. I mentioned it in passing to one of the students not long after, and she was devastated on my behalf – more than I was, if I’m honest. It caught me off guard, and it’s stayed with me since, because it pointed at something nobody really teaches you in the first few years of a career: Resilience to rejection has to be built, the same way any clinical skill does. It doesn’t arrive fully-formed alongside the qualification. Looking back at the whole shape of this career, it’s striking how much of it came from something not working out rather than a plan going exactly to plan – I’ve taken the path less travelled more than once, and changed lanes more times than I ever set out to. Learning to sit with that, rather than be flattened by it, has turned out to be as useful as anything I studied for.
What I’d tell a new graduate
So, to the four of them raising a glass last night, exams still ahead, and to everyone else in their position: The degree is a foundation, not a fixed destination, and the fear of getting things wrong doesn’t really go away either – it just becomes something you learn to work alongside rather than wait to outgrow. Community pharmacy, hospital pharmacy, oncology, a lecture theatre, a policy panel – none of it happened because I always knew where I was going. Most of it happened because I said ‘yes’ while still slightly unsure I was ready, which, looking back, might be the only qualification that actually matters.
For anyone standing at the start of their register entry, wondering what a career in pharmacy looks like: I still don’t fully know what mine looks like either, and I’m starting to think that’s the good part.
