Wednesday 12 February 2014

The importance of a fluffy pen

Many years ago, in my pre-reg year, I was pulled into an office by my tutor and told that I needed to sober up. She didn't mean that in an alcohol sense, but instead that I needed to start being more serious, dour, and less quirky. She told me that my personality, as it was, wasn't right to be a professional.

At the time, I believed her. She told me that I would never make a good pharmacist if I carried on the way I was. I was terrified, as all I wanted to do with my life was to be a pharmacist. If I couldn't be a good one, then I would really need to change my personality.

All of this started because I had a Christmas pen. It played tinny music for an alarmingly long time when pressed, and it became a bit of a joke in the dispensary to sneak up behind me when I was working and set it off, making everyone dissolve into giggles. A dispensing assistant, who was wearing a Christmas tie, was also told off, and strongly advised to not wear it again.

But nowadays, I disagree heartily that you have to be serious to be professional. I think a little bit of well-placed silliness and a lot of humour can add to our professionalism.

We need to be approachable to patients. And what makes a person more approachable than a little bit of personality? Nothing, except perhaps a novelty pen. On a couple of occasions, women who have come to see me about the emergency hormonal contraception pill, and who have been very nervous, have ended up giggling at a ridiculously fluffy pink flamingo pen I used to have. It broke the ice, and they could see that I was a person just like them, and I wasn't going to sit there all business-suited and high and mighty at the other side of the table and judge them. They felt a lot more comfortable because of that pen, and I think I was able to help them a lot more as a result.

At the moment, I have a Special Pen in my desk drawer. It is comedically large, pink, and slightly phallic, with some floppy rubber spikes on the end. I like to take it out of my desk drawer and offer it up, straight-faced, when people ask to borrow a pen.

My current Special Pen. Banana for scale.



We health care professionals deal with a lot of dark stuff on a daily basis: sickness, death, disability, anger, frustration etc. We need to balance that darkness out with something lighter. Whether its doing something daft in the dispensary to make your staff laugh for a few seconds when times are stressful, or donning a fox mask and writing silly things on the internet, it all counts. 

As long as we put the patient first, we treat others with respect, and we work within our limits, true professionalism doesn't have to mean that we all walk about with serious faces.

Hxxx