You did a great job drafting my statement, thank you very much.

E.S. (Application for pharmacy program July 2011)

 I wish to sincerely express my thanks to you for taking such great pains and hard work. Thank you sir, I have just read my statement of purpose; it is eloquent, persuasive and convincing. You have clearly expressed what I wanted to say. I am very satisfied with the statement of purpose. Once again, thank you for your excellent service.

 MN (Application for Master’s in Pharmacy, March 2011)

The best that you can ensure that you have an excellent chance of entering into pharmacy school is by taking courses that will make you well-suited to pharmacy studies, and doing well in those courses. You need to get as high a GPA as you can. Even the easiest pharmacy schools to get into will require you to have a good GPA. Almost everyone accepted into pharmacy school has a relevant four year degree.

You also need to make sure you have some amount of on-the-job experience. Try to get some kind of internship position in a pharmacy, or work with a pharmacist. Any hands-on experience is more likely to make you an appealing candidate for a pharmacy program. Working in the field will help you to obtain the skills and knowledge you'll need when you start working as a pharmacist. If you can work as a pharmacy technician prior to attempting entry into a pharmacy school, you will have an even greater advantage for getting into pharmacy school.

You will also want to make sure that your pharmacy personal statement is eloquent, concise, and convincing before submitting any applications. After you fill out my Online Interview Form, I will ask you some specific questions by email if I need any further information. Please also send your resume/CV and or rough draft if you have one: 

Free Document Evaluation: 

drrobertedinger@gmail.com

Premium Service US$299.00  

With maximum creativity, research as indicated, priority attention, and as many drafts as needed,

Dr Robert Edinger with Son David

drrobertedinger@gmail.com

After 20 years working in the NHS, Trudi Hilton became a humanitarian aid pharmacist. Since then, she’s worked in disaster areas and developing countries all over the world. Now she’s trying to demonstrate the value of a pharmacist to charities that work abroad.

In 1989, Trudi Hilton realized the valuable contribution UK pharmacists could make in other countries while working in a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Although she had only completed six months of pre-registration training in a hospital at that time, she believed her knowledge and skills were more advanced than the staff there.

The health system was also not as developed as it was in the UK. “I was determined that I would go back to work in a developing country or in a health system with poor resources,” she says.

Although she eventually realized this goal, Hilton went on to have a career in the National Health System (NHS) in the UK for 20 years first. She began by working as a hospital locum, before practicing in a general hospital and finally beginning a career at a South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in mental health.

Hilton then spent ten years in mental health pharmacy. She became chief pharmacist at West London Mental Health NHS Trust, but she was always hankering to get back in the field.

It was at this point that she was invited to sit on the board of a charity called International Health Partners (IHP). IHP donates new medicines from drug companies, warehouses and wholesalers in Europe and North America into developing countries.

As Hilton explains, “They wanted somebody on the board to guide them in their processes and to equip the recipients, because the biggest issue when you give a donation is whether or not the recipient country has the capacity to handle it.” With the charity, she travelled to Pakistan and Gambia twice in her first year. “I was using up all my annual leave to go and visit these places and I thought, the potential here is absolutely huge,” she says.

In 2011, IHP invited her to join as a staff member. Hilton decided to seize the opportunity. “I thought I would meet other people working in that sector and learn from them, because in the NHS we have such a good peer group,” says Hilton. But she discovered that there was hardly anyone else in this field: there were no pharmacists working in NGOs in the UK, not even at Save the Children, Red Cross or Merlin. Organizations had logisticians managing their medicines for them instead. Hilton basically learnt from people in the field.

Every country has different challenges and tensions to consider, including getting medicines through customs and an indigenous skill set. “Ethiopia has such a good medicines program that they don’t want donations because it’ll undermine them,” says Hilton. Providing humanitarian aid can sometimes be controversial in itself.

Hilton was made redundant from IHP at the end of 2014 and since then, she´s been working as a consultant for humanitarian aid and development. She has made herself a three-year plan to say yes to every opportunity that comes her way, while still trying to make a living.

Her first placement as a World Health Organization (WHO) consultant was in the Philippines from January to March 2015. She was asked to work after the typhoon disaster. “The funding after the typhoon meant that we could do a mental health project. The idea was that people affected by a disaster must be very depressed and they’ve probably got post-traumatic problems — and that wasn’t what we found at all. The whole community was affected, but there was a high level of mutual support.

Hilton discovered there had never been a mental health service in the region. People with chronic mental illness were physically restrained by their families, so they couldn’t engage with society. The patients were put on medications and began re-integrating with society after around two months. “It is amazing, it makes me cry because it’s so incredible,” says Hilton.

Once they had started training local practitioners to recognize mental illness, they encountered further problems because there were no medicines available. So Hilton helped them to improve the supply chain.

However, now the funding for the project has finished, her role in the program is likely to be over. She says that getting used to life as a consultant may be challenging, due to the short nature of each project.

There is a limited number of jobs in this field. Global pharmacist Kate Enright is now working for Save the Children in the UK and, together, Hilton and Enright are aiming to raise the profile of the importance of making sure pharmacists are working where medicines are deployed.

Some agencies spend millions on medicines and they write a lot of it off. They don’t necessarily have guidelines to make sure it’s appropriately used. A lot of value could be added with just one pharmacist per organization, Hilton says.

For those that cannot or do not want to do field work, Hilton suggests getting involved by other means. “Some of the pharmacists in the UK helped the Department for International Development response to Ebola by looking at treatment options,” she says.

But you can make a lot of difference with a very little intervention, says Hilton. “When you work in the West, everything is organized and it runs smoothly. When you go to another place and it’s not running so smoothly, there’s real room for improvement and you can be part of the solution.”

Do you fancy getting involved in a humanitarian mission? If so, please don´t hesitate to let us know if you´d like assistance writing a personal statement of purpose, or other documents so they really reflect your experience, passions and talents. All the best.