I enjoy using social media. I’m on Facebook and LinkedIn, I try to tweet and occasionally even swarm. I don’t have many followers, mainly because I can’t tweet and drive – yet. So I’m a reader rather than a writer.

Most multiples don’t allow employees to put where they work on social media, so most people are good employees and don’t. The main rule to live by is to say nothing about work (except the nice stuff about your boss, your team or your company).

One of my guilty pleasures is to follow the many pharmacy humour accounts that have sprung up and grown across social media in recent years. I love how they are able to portray the entertainment, pathos and frustration of those moments that only people who work in community pharmacy every day will understand. I’m even big enough to laugh at and share the jokes that poke fun at area managers.

But I see trouble ahead in that some of the accounts have started to head in a worrying direction. They have gone beyond finding humour in the shared experiences of community pharmacy. They have started to cross a line into poking fun at and, worse, manifesting actual resentment and mistreatment of some of the very people who depend on pharmacy. The people that pharmacy depends on for its continued income.

I’m talking about the substance misuse clients, the elderly patients with compliance issues, the patients with hygiene problems and housebound patients who are concerned about their delivery arriving. I’ve even seen jokes and humour directed at specific multiples and wholesalers. Watch out folks: someone who knows you will eventually see what you’ve liked.

As an area manager I know how easy it is to be seen as the spoiler of happiness for many people in a community pharmacy. I don’t comment on this issue because I want to be a killjoy. I know I am risking a flaming for suggesting these posts are meant in anything other than good humour. But we need to be mindful of what these accounts and posts say about us as a collective.

The fact that they attract such huge numbers of followers and likes suggest they connect with our working emotions in a way other media has never achieved. But: do we want groups of patients to think we are seething in our dispensaries every time they walk in, that we laugh at them after they have phoned us or that we don’t actually enjoy helping them? Would we want commissioners and other professionals to think we don’t love helping people and providing services?

My plea is simple: keep these accounts about harmless fun. Just as we consider carefully before we post about our jobs, we should adopt the same approach when we post about community pharmacy in general.

The Area Manager has worked for all of the large multiples

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