Essay on Working Effectively With Others

Introduction

Working at the community pharmacy required a lot of interaction with colleagues and clients and I had to do so harmoniously so as to provide a good working environment for everyone. To do this it required me to communicate openly and honestly with my colleagues and also being open to new ideas. While working at the community pharmacy I had to deal with an issue with a colleague who kept second guessing my opinion even in front of clients making it very difficult to work together comfortably. One time a client came in asking for the best cream to use for her rash and I recommended she use Travocot cream since I had looked at her rash but my colleague told her to ignore my recommendation and take Clozole B cream. This made it hard for the client to trust us and she left. To solve this, I called my colleague aside after hours and used a very open and flexible approach to explain to her that we had to be able to trust and respect each other's decisions in order to work well together. She graciously accepted my request, acknowledged her mistake and even apologized. We have continually worked well together in mutual respect to date.

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Priority Setting

As a pharmacy student, I have a lot of classes and assignments to get through before I go off to work at the community pharmacy. It is tough to balance both sides but I found that setting my priorities right helped a lot in managing my hours. I remember a time our lecturer gave us a very lengthy project to complete in groups. This was tough for me because I didn't get time to attend most group work sessions with my working hours. I decided to take charge of the situation and talked to my group members asking them to agree to a meeting during my off day which they thankfully did. I decided to group my priorities into categories of urgent and not urgent and this helped me focus on my work at the pharmacy effectively and still manage to meet the group on my off day to ensure that we completed the project on that day, though we completed ahead of the lecturers set deadline. I have learned to use the same strategy in all my work dealings where I categorize all my priorities in lists of urgent and not urgent and this has helped me get through my days effectively.

Leadership

Leadership is a quality that is very important in a workplace to ensure that there is effective management and that people work hard all the time. I believe that leadership is a quality I possess and have been able to exercise a time or two while working at the community pharmacy. On one weekend the sales manager at the community pharmacy didn't come to work due to a family emergency and some suppliers came to make a medicine delivery to the pharmacy. The manager was the one who usually confirmed the invoice to make sure everything was okay with the delivery. My colleagues and I didn't know what to do but I took the initiative to deal with the delivery because it had to be done. I talked to the suppliers and asked them a few questions about how they make the delivery and I learned how to confirm the invoice and make sure that the drugs they delivered were not expired. After a few hours we were done and the suppliers left. When the manager came back to work he commended me for stepping up to the challenge and helped me learn all there was to learn about the deliveries to date I take care of all deliveries anytime he is not available.

Decision Making

I have had to make very important and at times hard decisions while working at the community pharmacy. This has taught me a lot about how to make tough decisions even when they make you unpopular with your peers. As I had talked about before, I stepped up and took on a challenge that helped the manager at the community pharmacy recognize me as a leader. He made me team leader and all pharmacy student working at the pharmacy reported to me first. I learned that being a team leader meant that I would have to make decisions which would undoubtedly make me very unpopular amongst other students I worked with. At one time the manager passed a memo about a seminar which was going to be held by one of the leading drug suppliers in the country and ten people in the community pharmacy were given a chance to attend the manager tasked me with choosing three of my fellow students to attend. This was a hard decision to make but I made it anyway. We were five students at the time and everyone wanted to attend. Though it was hard I chose picked three of the newest members to attend so that they could have an opportunity to learn more from other pharmacists in attendance. Though I had been given a chance to select myself among the three students, I gave up that chance to help the newer students who had joined us at the pharmacy.

Communication Skills

As a pharmacy student, I should always overcome the barriers to effective communication because conveying necessary information about medications provides better health outcomes for patients. One day, while I was working at the community pharmacy, a young teenage girl about my age came to the pharmacy asking which medicine was most appropriate to help with her acne. She had a heavy lisp and it was hard to understand what she was saying. I also noticed that she had applied a lot of heavy makeup in an attempt to cover up the acne. I took the chance to teach her about the pores on her skin and how they needed to breath but could not do so due to the heavy make-up which was clogging them and I also explained to her that clogged pores were most likely the cause of her acne problem. At the end of the counseling, I gave her Clozole B which I clearly explained that she should use twice a day for a week after washing her face in the morning and in the evening. I asked her if she had any questions and she had several which she asked and I answered despite the difficulties I had the understanding what she was saying. The words I did not understand I gave her a pen and paper and asked her to write them down. At the end of our talk, I asked if she understood the instructions on how to apply for the medicine and she answered yes. She left satisfied and wiser about her skin condition. It was a fruitful experience as this simple skill became a solution for managing the patient's condition.