“I am obviously delighted. You feel proud more than anything else but, as a health professional, you do also feel a little bit of guilt and embarrassment because you know there are so many others who also work really hard for their patients and work hard for each other. So, you very much want to enjoy the moment, but you know you are accepting it on behalf of your colleagues as well. It is fantastic to be recognised for the work I am fortunate to love doing.

 

Becoming a pharmacist was reasonably straightforward from me. I liked science at school and was generally interested in health but didn't have any particular desire to be a doctor. My dad was a plumber and he did a lot of work for pharmacist clients and I managed to get a bit of work experience with them and it really just went from there.

 

I met Noel Wicks through the British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association (BPSA). We work closely together. I was president for a couple of years while Noel did the public relations. He later went on to president. We were told that a small pharmacy in Scotland run by a brother and sister pharmacist was going to go on the market. We joked about it but knew it was far too early in our careers. But, because we were young and foolish and didn't really have any hang-ups about this sort of thing, we decided to drive up to Scotland and just pretend that we were going to buy a business. It would be good fun to go through the motions. Then it became a little more real than that. We managed to convince a bank to give us a bit of money – looking back they must have been absolutely mad – and, to cut a long story short, we ended up upping sticks and moving to Scotland and buying a small pharmacy serving Stirling University, and we just grew the business from there. That was the year 2000 when we bought it. We’d had no links whatsoever with Scotland until then. Now it is very much our home.

 

In our university community we see all types of patients from new-borns to the elderly, but we do see a different mix to your average pharmacy. Obviously, while we support the whole breadth of the staff, the fact that we have a large undergraduate and postgraduate population on campus for the majority of the year means that our population is skewed towards 17 to 25-year-old young adults.

 

On the surface you would think that this population would generally be healthy and while they generally are, there is still a lot of chronic illness, infections, dermatology issues and mental ill-health. A lot of people are away from home for the first time and it’s the first opportunity they've had to manage their own health and how they access healthcare services, so it is an excellent opportunity to teach people how to use the health service and community pharmacy properly. It is easy to assume that because they are well educated and their well-read that they can find their way through those things and that's not entirely the case because they do need help through a bit of a guide and the need advice they need somebody to bounce people off just like any other patient. They are a fantastic patient population to work.

 

Having been Vice Chair of the Scottish Pharmacy Board, then stepped off and then back on again, I have to say it is the things away from the committee table that I enjoy the most. We have an active RPS Local programme with local meetings at health board level around clinical matters, professional development and, of course, revalidation. It's important to support the great team we have in Scotland and the work everyone does talking to MSPs, ministers and fellow health people about pharmacist capabilities and making sure that were not forgotten about, that the awareness is raised about the hard work that we do across all sectors where we work.

 

By the time people read this it will be back to business as usual. I guess this kind of recognition means you get a little burst of publicity and it raises awareness. I am very fortunate to be involved in the RPS and Community Pharmacy Scotland. I already feel that I already have a voice so I don't particularly crave any more of that, but if this means that I get listened to a little more, I’ll take advantage of that.

 

What the MBE has done is that it has given me a chance to say quite a few thank yous to people who have helped me along the way, and to highlight the people around me who have made it possible for me to just get on with my career and develop my clinical practice.”