My name is Sean Keown and I work as a pharmacy technician. My job involves dispensing and checking medicines, counselling patients, and updating computer systems related to the issue of patient medicines (like adding new medicines to database including any safety warnings).
I decided to work in this area because I wanted to work for my local community, doing something to help people, and I’ve always been good at science.
The best thing about my job is counselling patients so they can get the most from their medicines.
The worst day I ever had was a day when I was under real pressure because our NHS trust’s IT systems went down. I had to coordinate staff to work with paper systems and liase with the trust IT department to make sure critical pharmacy IT systems were prioritised as these aid with medicine safety.
The government wants to make it legal for agency workers to cover my role if I was to ever go on strike. The main reason I do not think this is a good idea is agency workers would not know local policies and this would put them under unfair pressure and increase the risk of error. Using agency staff would also cost the trust more as agency rates are higher than the cost of employing a member of staff.
I think this will have a negative impact on people who use the service I provide because the agency staff will not know the way of working in our department, so delays in provision of medicines could occur.
This could make the service I provide unsafe because agency staff will have no local training, increasing the chance of errors being made.
The Trade Union Bill is a bad thing because it will stop unions doing their job; it will make it much harder for them to ensure the health and safety of workers and patients, negotiate with employers regarding changes in practice, and fight for equality in the workplace.
