In the long awaited December 2019 version of the 2T1 feature, we sat down and had an interview with the current Class of 2T1 President: Yifan!
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what were you doing before pharmacy?
Yifan: That’s a bit of a convoluted story. I was born in China and I lived there for half of my life. My family decided to move to Canada and we moved back and forth between the two countries, because my mom wanted to keep her job. We lived in Vancouver, then Toronto for a while, and finally settled in White Rock B.C. when I was 12. Then I moved to Montreal to do my undergrad at McGill.
Outside of studying what do you like to do?
Yifan: I love boardgames, like Avalon. I usually like co-op games, because I don’t really like to competitive games. I also love the anime “One Piece”. I loved it so much that I would talk about it every day in my high school French class. It annoyed my French teacher so much! Right before I graduated I drew a One Piece character (Robin) and gave it to her. She still has it hanging on the blackboard. I’m sure most people know this by now – I also love watching Korean dramas and listening to K-pop. I basically learnt Korean from doing this, and I volunteered on a website to translate English subtitles for Korean dramas. Oh, and I love hanging out with my friends! I have friends too!
What are you most proud of?
Yifan: Hmm… I am most proud of my ability to make friends. I like having a lot of friends around, but moving around a lot, it’s tough. Every time you move, you have to start all over again. I am very proud of myself for having great friends, especially here in pharmacy school.
If you were Prime Minister for a day, what would you do? (Specially related to healthcare policies)
Yifan: One thing that should be done is definitely universal healthcare, including Pharmacare, but I know that in order to do that, a lot of the pharmacist’ jobs – a lot of our wages will go down. I heard multiple people saying that they know it’s a good thing to happen but it sort of hurts our wages so they also don’t want it. There’s the 2 sides of pharmacy: one is the business side, and one is the patient care side. As a future pharmacist the patient care side of me wants Pharmacare, while the business side of me understands how this may affect profits.
Another thought I had came to me after I went to a very informative CPhA conference. Health technology has been progressing rapidly, and as a pharmacist we should be more aware and educated on this topic. We have progressed so far that Smartwatches can measure your heartrate and things that can even measure your temperature over a period of time to tell you if you are ovulating. If I were appointed prime minister for a day, I would implement a policy that would reimburse pharmacists for learning and educating patients on these health technologies.
I think in general the reimbursement model could be better. In Quebec, they were discussing the idea of a tiered reimbursement system. In this model, they will charge a higher dispensing fee for more complicated drugs. For example, refrigerated items, cancer drugs, or something that is more expensive and/or have more risks associated with it will be charged at a higher dispensing fee accordingly. This way, we’re getting paid for doing more work on drugs other than amoxicillin 500mg 21 caps.
If you were granted one wish, what would you wish for?
Yifan: Can I wish for more wishes? Whenever they have those genies granting wishes in movies or stories, I always thought why can’t the main character wish for more wishes so you can have endless wishes?
I would wish for something that’ll allow me to do a lot of things I want to do. For example, have a lot of power so I can basically have more wishes or have lots of money so I can many things. I’ll make everyone my friend! That would be pretty good. If I want something, I’ll just ask them and then If they want something, I’ll help them too. Mutually beneficial!
In your opinion, what the future of pharmacy should be about?
Yifan: I feel very passionate about the role of technology in pharmacy. I was once talking to a Pharmacist who envisioned a pharmacy fully integrated with technology. He was envisioning having the front shop like a hybrid of Apple Store, where they have all the electronics and service people upfront, and the traditional dispensing in the back. The pharmacists would be upfront and interact more with patients and counselling; the machines at the back will do all the dispensing and technical work. This model would improve the public’s opinion on our role as clinicians, because the public still sees us as “pill dispensers”.
The health care system itself is lagging technologically. How many sectors do you still see use faxes regularly as a means of communication when we can easily send messages over the internet? Our patients themselves have been using the internet to learn about their health, and they are using apps. It is our job to guide them through this, they expect us to know how to use these technologies, but sometimes we are so focused just on the drug and its therapeutics. If we educate ourselves with health care technology, as health care providers, we can give more well-rounded recommendations to our patients.
Also, our current reimbursement model has a fundamental conflict of interest. We want our patients to get better, but at the same time, if they get better, we don’t dispense as many pills or make as much money. We shouldn’t be getting reimbursed solely based on the number of pills we give out, but based on how our patients health improves. This is what I see for the future of pharmacy. We can find an alternative reimbursement model. For example, in the States there are some insurance companies that are reimbursing health technology gadgets because they are the ones who actually want patients to be healthy. Reimbursing a smartwatch that costs $300, but has the potential to reduce the risk of ER visits, which cost like $3000. Why not?
What do you think about the notion people have that our profession maybe replaced by technology such as amazon?
Yifan: There’s a website called “Will robots take over my job”. If you search up pharmacists, we have one of the lowest chances of being replaced with robots. The chances are about 1%, whereas if you looked at accountants their chances were about 94%. The reason why we have such low chances is not because of the technical things we do in the pharmacy, since those things can be easily replaced by automation and technology. It’s our clinical knowledge and counseling that keep us from getting replaced. I don’t see Amazon as that big of a threat because they are just offering the dispensing and delivery part of the profession. We still are irreplaceable with our clinical knowledge. We need to focus on our abilities as clinicians, and advocate and expand our role in the healthcare system. I’ve been to CPhA for the past 2 years. The first one I went to did not talk about technology at all, but the second one, they realized how important it is that they dedicated one day of the conference entirely to the topic of technology. At the beginning of the talk, everyone was very dubious about how technology is going to help the profession instead of replacing the profession. However, by the end of the talk, most people agreed that technology could help us instead of just replacing us. With our unique set of clinical knowledge, we can use technology to replace our technical work, and free up more time for us to focus on the clinical aspects with our patients.
