The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7200 p750
1 June 2002

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How much are you worth? [more]
Plus ça change [more]

How much are you worth?

Ian Walker, a professor of economics at Warwick University, has developed a complicated formula that enables people to calculate how much their time is worth. The value of an hour of your time depends on which part of the country you live, ie, the local cost of living, your hourly wage and your tax rate. Making the calculation is a bit of a party game so that if, for example, each of your hours is worth £9.60 it costs you 48p to brush your teeth for three minutes. On average earnings, a British man is worth 10p a minute and a woman 8p.

The more serious issue for pharmacists, however, is determining what their hourly rate should be. This is becoming an issue for community pharmacists who are beginning to think about charging patients for particular services, and want to work out what a pharmacist is worth per hour and how much of that cost, plus costs of disposables, use of equipment, etc, can be passed on to customers. As you can read on p758, in these circumstances a pharmacist-minute is worth £1.

Pharmacists offering these specialist services as a locum can expect to earn about £35 per hour. What is surprising, therefore, is that some locum pharmacists offering a "standard" service may still be paid only £17.50 per hour, particularly in isolated, rural communities, whose resident pharmacists may have no option to earn more by working elsewhere.

This week, Provincial Pharmacy Locum Services — one of the few agencies that publicises its scale — raised its rates by 5.5 per cent, taking the standard locum rate to £19 for England.

For all those pharmacists who complain how little they earn, and what long hours they have to work, the time has come. Refuse to work unless you are paid at least £19 an hour or there are compelling reasons for you to accept less. If you are known to be good and reliable, employers will soon come knocking on your door eager to pay your preferred rate.

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Plus ça change

As part of our contribution to the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations, a few weeks ago we wrote to 50 pharmacists who first joined the Register in 1952. We invited them to contribute short articles on their experiences or thoughts about the practice of pharmacy over the past 50 years. A selection of the pieces sent in are published here (PDF*, 170K). What is striking about the comments is that, although so much has changed, the service to patients and the community is as important a feature of pharmacy today as it was then.

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  * PDF files on PJ Online require Acrobat Reader 4 or later.