What is it like to help out in a hospital pharmacy during COVID-19 times?

David, what was your motivation for this voluntary service?

Being an experimentalist I could not do so much of my research from home. Of course, I did some data analysis and other things from home. But, when a request was forwarded to us from the cantonal hospital Basel-Land saying that they needed support because they had a much higher work load at the start of the pandemic, I thought: maybe I could help out there, support the health care system in some way, and of course, see if this was an interesting new experience.

For the past four weeks you worked at the pharmacy of the cantonal hospital of Basel-Land. What were you doing and how did your week look like?

I think it was a fairly standard work set-up. I usually started my day at 8 AM and worked until 5 PM, sometimes I had to leave a little bit earlier for meetings. Basically, I was supporting the logistics at the pharmacy: the hospital is quite large and there were a lot of drugs coming in and going out. And every day we received a list from the different hospital units about what kind of drugs they needed. I had to stock them and give out the requested meds and had to make sure that everything was logged correctly in the database.

No mixing of drugs, no producing of sanitizer…?

No. Initially they wanted someone who produces disinfectants but then they found a different solution for this original request and did not need me for this specific task. Mixing of drugs…this is all medication that goes into patients, I mean this is all stuff that must be produced under GMP {good manufacturing practice} and it is specialized personnel who does this mixing of drugs. A pharmacy cannot just hire someone without the appropriate license who mixes the chemo-therapeutics, for example.

In what way do you think you benefited from this type of work - personally and/or professionally?

Personally, it was a very interesting experience. My usual work is in this huge bio-medical research complex, and there is also the whole pharmaceutical industry and then there are the patients… Helping out at the pharmacy was a very different part of this whole system, which was very interesting to see. It was also very interesting to interact with people that I would not usually interact with. There were pharmacists, there were also so called pharma-assistants, there were a few doctors coming by… It was very interesting to see this different type of work and these different types of people. Professionally, I am not sure whether I will benefit much from this experience, my work is very different to what I did at the pharmacy…but, you never know. Again, personally it was a very nice experience.

At times you must have experienced quite a stressful environment. Has your view on the coronavirus pandemic, the step-by-step end of the lockdown, and the possibility of a second wave later this year changed in any way?

Not really… The people at the hospital and the people at the pharmacy they also don’t know much more than we do. So, they really prepared for the worst: there were lots of drugs coming in that are needed to treat COVID-19 patients. One could say: There was a bit of a hysteria in the beginning, there was a lot of personnel also coming from the Swiss army, and in the end it turned out not to be so bad: this huge wave of patients did not arrive at the hospital - which is a good thing! Which also means that there are all these drugs stocked up for a second wave… So, I expect the hospital pharmacies to be quite well prepared now. Also, maybe the media did not really portrait this topic correctly, but at least in Basel-Land the situation in the hospital was not as dramatic as I expected it to be…

…which is good, of course, luckily!

Thank you very much, David, and: stay healthy!