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Araniya Maharaj, intern pharmacist
Hi! My name is Araniya and I chose to study pharmacy because I liked the idea of helping people. My journey with Good Price Pharmacy Warehouse (GPPW) started 5 years ago, when I first walked into one of our stores as a 17-year-old year 12 high school student. In true nerd form, I decided to skip out on schoolies, and instead come to the local pharmacy for some work experience, because I’d put pharmacy as number 1 on my QTAC preferences but honestly wasn’t sure if I’d like it. Long story short, I loved it, and five years later here I am, writing this as an intern pharmacist at the same exact store!
Being an intern with GPPW:
Being an intern with GPPW has certainly been busy! We offer a lot of different professional services, and I’ve been lucky enough to participate in quite a few of these: from immunisations and MedsChecks, to monitoring chronic health conditions in store and packing dose administration aides—there’s always something interesting happening in store!
Intern Training so far:
One of the things I love most about being an intern with GPPW is that it’s allowed me to network with other professionals in the industry—including other interns! Over the year, all the GPPW interns will meet up for intern training days, where we get the opportunity to learn about everything pharmacy from industry professionals. We cover a lot of different topics: from pharmacy ownership, to managing chronic health conditions and learning about different systems in the pharmacy, we truly cover it all. I love that we get to do this training with other interns from all our different stores as it gives us the opportunity to build our social and professional networks, develop our interprofessional collaboration skills, and most importantly, make sure we’re all keeping up to date with intern year deadlines.
Preceptors
Our preceptors are all highly trained pharmacists, who really do more than the bare minimum to be a pharmacist. At my store, and at many stores within GPPW, most pharmacists are qualified to vaccinate, prescribe antibiotics for uncomplicated UTIs, and conduct home medicine reviews, which means that we, as interns, get the chance to observe and participate in all of these. To me, the fact that our preceptors have set such high standards of their roles as pharmacists highlights the fact that they are passionate about what they do; which in turn makes them passionate to teach us everything they know (which is a lot!)
Being a pharmacy student at GPPW:
Being a pharmacy student taught me a lot of what I needed to know for my degree, and definitely gave me a lot more practical pharmacy experience than university did. GPPW accommodated for a very taxing university timetable and gave me the opportunity to complete a multitude of extra learning throughout my degree, which definitely helped me to be a better pharmacy student. As a pharmacy student at GPPW, I learnt how to solve over the counter requests, how to communicate with patients and how to dispense using our software. I was able to transfer these skills to my university degree, and to my university placements and found my training at GPPW to be extremely beneficial to my pharmacy career, in all aspects. I think working in pharmacy, whilst studying pharmacy, is the best way to gain practical experience and real-world learning, and I’d strongly recommend it to all students!
The first few months as a new graduate
The first few months of my internship have been incredibly busy, but I have learnt so much! I have had to learn the names of many of our regular customers in store and have struggled with keeping my white coat white on lunch breaks, but overall, I absolutely love being an intern at GPPW because it has given me the opportunity to gain a very deep understanding of pharmacy, in every capacity. I love that our model at GPPW is to deliver quality healthcare, in the most economical way, because I truly believe that is the way of the future, where quality care is available at accessible prices. One thing is for sure: being an intern at GPPW makes me extremely excited for my future as a pharmacist.
