A Dose of Courage

As a child, Yee Yuen Fen’s worst nightmare was consuming medication. To overcome this fear, Yuen Fen decided to “take the bull by its horns” and pursued a career in Pharmacy as a challenge. Today, Yuen Fen is the Chief Pharmacist at the Subang Jaya Medical Centre, playing a vital role helping patients get well.

While pharmacists play a critical role in providing prescribed medication, Yuen Fen's job description goes beyond that. "One of my roles as a Chief Pharmacist is to ensure the supply of high quality products while maintaining an extensive hospital formulary which consists of more than 5,000 medicines," she says.

In the hospital, Yuen Fen is involved in driving medication safety initiatives so that patients can benefit from the good therapeutic outcome and are not harmed in any way.

Besides the clinical aspect of the job, Yuen Fen also ensures the financial goals of the department are met by monitoring and reporting on the expenditure for medicine usage within the hospital. One of the challenging tasks she ever had to deal with was during the implementation of GST in Malaysia.

"It was new to all of us. We had to manually reconcile our hospital formulary with the list of more than 5,000 national essential medicines which are zero rated, within a period of less than 10 days. I don’t think we could have achieved it without the hard work of the entire team. Teamwork does matter!" Yuen Fen adds.

But even with the struggles faced, her efforts were all worth it as she gets to heal and meet new people every day. "Our patients are our best teachers. We learn and grow based on their feedback and seeing a patient leave the hospital with peace of mind is my biggest job satisfaction. It makes all my efforts worthwhile!"

"Seeing a patient leave the hospital with peace of mind is my biggest job satisfaction."

Yuen Fen's journey has been a long and fruitful one, from dealing with medication phobia in her younger days to being a successful pharmacist today. Working in Ramsay Sime Darby Health Care not only expanded her clinical knowledge but also other valuable skills such as inventory management, finance, customer service skills, and people management.

"Seeing a patient leave the hospital with peace of mind is my biggest job satisfaction."