I had 8 enjoyable years as an NHS pharmacist, delivering safe patient care with my clinical knowledge, communication skills and ability to work under pressure. Resourcefulness and resilience were essential. Problem-solving and reasoning skills allowed implementation of change at the point of prescribing. Excellent teaching and presenting skills were required to train junior doctors, nurses and pharmacists, and present audit and clinical guidelines at key meetings. I developed an understanding of how a hospital operates to support service development and patient safety.In 2015 I set up a new Medicines Optimisation Service in Weymouth; a collaborative project among local healthcare bodies to reduce medicines-related harm in elderly patients. I liaised with stakeholders and piloted different ways of working to establish the most cost-effective path to the best results. I managed admin staff to ensure my time was best utilised, developed guidelines for effective consultations and trained colleagues to run the service in my absence. I identified a need for a software system to accurately record interventions and guided development on the resulting app (clinicalcapture.com), which drove the project success. Completing my postgraduate MSc evaluated and demonstrated an improvement in medication adherence, a reduction in medicines-related harm and savings over £100,000 by reducing medicines waste. I decided I needed a new challenge after starting a family, something to channel my creativity with the flexibility to be a Mum. I spent 7 weeks at iO Academy learning HTML, CSS and Javascript. Learning to code was aided by my existing skills honed in the NHS. I foresee huge developments in healthcare through technology and coding was an opportunity to contribute.With COVID and the challenges of home-working, we decided that my husband’s IT business needed to diversify. I combined my experience of new service set-up, customer care and flair for design with James’ IT and business skills to start a co-working office business. I designed the interior space, create marketing material using Adobe, maintain our website with my coding skills, run marketing campaigns and manage financial accounts. I enjoy bringing experience of large corporation policy and process management into a new start-up business, so it can scale up efficiently. It has been a fantastic project so far, made more enjoyable by working alongside my husband and fitting around our young family.
