Medical professions, including pharmacy, need more Māori enrolments. When Tim was finishing up First Year Health Science at Otago, all the professional programmes were short of Māori students. To Tim, being a role model in the community that young people can look up to is important. For rangatahi, being inspired to go into higher education by those high-visibility role models is the future Tim wants to see. “There is a whole world of help waiting for you, as a Māori student…the advantages you have access to are pretty significant. We have to take advantage of them. But it starts younger than we’re currently doing. We need to get younger kids interested in higher education.”
The future of pharmacy is dependent on young people. Tim believes that having visibility on the current workforce and what it looks like is important. That it is something that has been lacking for a long time. “I remember hearing David Clark… touting at a pharmaceutical society symposium how pharmacy was in for a bright future because we were a younger workforce than GPs.” In 2020 the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners released survey figures that the average age of a GP in New Zealand was 53. “It’s like saying you’re younger than your grandparents. You are, but you’re aging all the time too. We [New Zealand] had a brief glut of students, but we lost a lot overseas or to other careers. When I went through the course it was the most intensive four-year course of all the health sciences. If you can pass that degree you can do a lot of other things. And if you don’t give talented people something to stay for, they’ll move on.” Despite this, Tim says there are niches and pathways for growth in a career in pharmacy. So while he doesn’t agree with why Clark said there was a bright future for pharmacy, he does agree that it can be bright.
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