‘A lot of us took Saturday jobs for the experience we weren’t getting at uni’
Pharmacy students who have missed out on laboratory time and practical placements say they had to rely on Saturday jobs to get the experience needed to pass their exams.
Ellie Monachan and Hammad Mukhtar, who graduated from Strathclyde University last month, said that they not only missed nearly two years of in-person lab work and placements, but when they returned, they were subject to strict socialdistancing rules.
Monachan said: “People have been struggling with their placements being cancelled. If you caught Covid then your placement was completely written off and they wouldn’t let you come in.
“Placements are a huge part of your course as we need to write essays on them and to learn the practical skills which we were not getting in workshops.”
Mukhtar said: “A lot of people had to rely on Saturday jobs they had outside of university in pharmacies for that experience.”
Even after laboratory lessons returned, students were subject to strict social-distancing measures, meaning they did not gain as much out of it as they should.
Mukhtar said: “Half of our second-year and all of our third-year lab work was online, and the teachers just told you what happened and that was that, obviously you couldn’t do it yourself. And then we came back in person in January in our final year. It was very hard to do group work when we had to sit far apart from each other.”
Monachan said: “It was nice to go back in but I was also wondering what the point was. It was strange because we couldn’t stand within two metres of each other in the lab but then we would all go to a cafe together afterwards.”
Strathclyde University said: “Our Mpharm students were amongst the first to return to campus in January 2021 and all of the students completed their experiential learning on site in community hospitals and other primary care settings all the way through the pandemic – and we are grateful to those learning providers for making that happen. In addition, all of this year’s cohort have secured foundation year training placements.”