Sweden Day 4: Part 2

7 April 2010
Uppsala, Sweden

For the afternoon/evening, we walked back over to the BMC. I took a picture of it finally! We met up with Sofia, and she and her colleague Erica were working on a research proposal about the impact of pharmacists on counseling patients with the new switch to generics that is occurring in their healthcare market.






From there, Sofia and Erica were going to walk us over to the Pharmen buidling, which is the pharmacy student union. However, we met the VP in the hallway, so we walked with her from the school. The Vice President's name is Ana, and she is very nice. We talked about the differences in pharmacy education with her--pharmacist vs. prescriptionist. I should be able to describe these differences in more detail later today, as we are meeting with Andy to talk about that later.


Once we got to the Pharmen building, Ana showed us around the ground floor. This holds a room referred to as Apotek (the Swedish work for pharmacy), and is filled with old apothecary stuff--kinda like the stuff that Dr. Eoff keeps in the Johnson Bldg conference room and will eventually display in the new pharmacy building. There is also a very large room that they rent out for parties and dinners and such. There was once a restaurant in the building, but it is no longer open. I believe that the kitchen is also on this level, but we didn't get a tour of that.



The floor above contains offices, computer rooms, tv rooms, etc. They produce a magazine called the Reptile. This is a student-produced, rather than administration-produced, so we don't really have anything comparable at UT that I'm aware of.

The basement holds a room with a bar in the corner where they hold the Mentor's Pub every Wednesday. This is an event where the students in the union are invited to the Pub (which serves reduced price food and beer) as are local pharmacists. It's kind of like a networking event where the students can talk to the local pharmacists about their jobs and opportunities in pharmacy.

I had a Greek hamburger for dinner which was very tasty. I don't have a picture of this because you all know what a hamburger looks like, and it didn't look any different. Josh also had a hamburger, though I think it was just a plain cheeseburger, nothing fancy.

We stayed and chatted with the students for awhile about the differences in our educational programs. Prescriptionists go to school for three years, and pharmacists go to school for five years. Legally, there is no difference between these two professions. Prescriptionists tend to be those in the community pharmacies, whereas pharmacists tend to go into research and industry. They have a semester of internships which are only in community pharmacy. They are soon going to offer a clinical pharmacy course, which they are excited about.

There was a presentation after the dinner event, but we didn't stay for that because it was given in Swedish.

I forgot to mention that one of the officers bore a strange resemblance to Edward (aka Robert Pattinson) from Twilight. I was hoping that there would be an opportunity for a group photo, so you all could see for yourselves, but alas, there wasn't.