The HPAI Annual Educational Conference 2025 featured a talk by Ms Harpreet Chana, who trained as a pharmacist and is also Founder and CEO of the Mental Health Academy in the UK. Ms Chana delivered
a talk titled ‘How to Beat the Pharmacy Burnout: Solution Through Prevention’, and gave the attendees her own account of her experiences with burnout and its effect on work and quality of life.
Ms Chana conducted an interactive questionnaire to establish levels of contentment and job satisfaction among the attendees. Phrases that were recurrent in the answers included ‘stressed’, ‘tired’, ‘overwhelmed’, ‘frustrated’, ‘under-valued’, and ‘challenged’, among others. “I show this tool to help you realise that you are not alone,” said Ms Chana. “Many of us feel like this, but we just don’t talk about it.”
She emphasised the importance of self-care to prevent burnout. Burnout itself is distinct from stress and is a more serious phenomenon, she explained, and told the conference that stress and the risk of burnout cannot be ignored. “It can happen to you,” Ms Chana emphasised. “When we are struggling with our mental health, it is okay not to be okay.
But we tell ourselves, particularly within pharmacy, that we are the ones who have to carry everyone else. We have to be the strong ones because we can’t call in sick because our patients won’t get their medicines. Before I had to go on leave because of stress and burnout, I could have counted on one hand how many days’ leave I had taken in my career.”
She recommended developing leadership skills as one of the preventive measures. “Then, we can choose our response,” she said. “Instead of having an emotional response and being triggered and having a stress response, you can actually choose your response and self-regulate better. In this way we can thrive in our lives and thrive in our careers, rather than just surviving — I wonder how many of us are just surviving at the moment, but we never really talk about it.”
