Importance of attitude and manners in pharmacy profession

This blog is purely meant for stressing on the essence of behavioral attitude in the noble profession of pharmacy.

Attitude is something which we learn right from our childhood. One can understand a child misbehaving at a place. If a matured person has a wrong manner, the difference it makes is that he loses his character. However, when it comes to the profession, he loses many things; character, responsibility involved in his work and even his job and work assigned, sometimes. Further, when it comes to a health- related profession like pharmacy, where a lot of interaction and communication skills are required with different personalities like physician, patient, colleagues, seniors etc., attitude and manners hold even a prior seat of importance.

Right from our childhood we are taught about behavior, manners, attitude etc., though practically. In the college life, a person is even ragged off by the seniors for a rude and arrogant attitude!!! What I want to stress upon through this blog to every reader, is to spread the importance of conduct and behavior in pharmacy line.

When an interviewer conducts an interview of a person for a job, what questions does he normally ask? He mainly asks questions from the following fields.

1. Personal and Family Data
2. Educational Background
3. Character Traits
4. Initiative and Creativity
5. Management Ability
6. Career Objectives
7. Suitability for Target Job
8. Salary Negotiations
9. Experience and Training
10. Technology Know-How
11. Interrogation Questions
12. Outside Interests
13. Questions to Ask the Interviewer

Thus, we see that the all these fields require answers that demand decency and humble attitude. Moreover, the interviewer gives the opportunity to the candidate to ask questions to the interviewer. This strongly tests the attitude with which the questions are asked by the candidate. Even the response involving the pharmaceutical knowledge must accompany a right behavior.

Perhaps, we can see that the interviewer goes into such questions which test our attitude, manners, conduct instead of knowledge in pharmacy. I am not saying that he only tests the attitude. But what is under his major consideration is what is called as ‘behavior’. This is quite evident from the ‘Do’s and Don’ts during an interview’ given on the homepage of pharmainfo.net. The interaction and common mistakes and their corrections are illustrated beautifully over there.

Let’s take another case, suppose we are in the same profession and at the same place of work; let it be any kind of work. Let it be hospital pharmacy, industry, R & D or anything else. Now, you hold a senior position to me and I am under your supervision. You have given me a work which I find is quite unpleasant for me and I am not willing to do that work. So how would I say you about that? Should I say straight forth that, “Sir, I don’t want to do this work”? This appears very rude. If I say it in this way, “Sir, that’s a wonderful job. But, I am afraid that I may not be able to give my maximum potential in this work.” Now it appears better. Perhaps, the communication skill and approach play a very important role.

Suppose I am a hospital pharmacist. I need to counsel a patient. For that, I need to be patient enough to listen to all his queries and answer them. It must not be like that he is eagerly asking questions and I am impatiently responding to him. Moreover, he must possess a conduct which is enough to convince the patient about his answers and clarifications. Hence, we see here that besides possessing knowledge in our profession, we need to maintain a proper behavior too.