When a patient walks into the pharmacy to visit, they are making a decision about their healthcare. Patient healthcare decisions should not be limited to choosing a doctor or pharmacy, but should extend to deciding how the doctor and pharmacist work with them to achieve their personal health goals. Pursuing a career in healthcare requires a commitment to long-term formal education, a large amount of debt, and a lifelong commitment to continuing education. After completing school, a pharmacist has a well-developed set of tools for managing patient populations to help them manage their healthcare. These tools are not acquired to determine a patient's healthcare needs. Pharmacists and physicians often complete their training and believe that education makes them better suited than the patient to assess the patient's needs. No one is better suited to making decisions regarding their body than the patient himself. My position in healthcare is that of a consultant rather than a manager. As a pharmacist I will instead work to educate patients so they can make informed decisions about their health. Educating patients allows them to be more autonomous in their pursuit of healthcare and also allows them to pursue treatments that are more beneficial to them personally rather than what is most beneficial to the pharmacist, doctor, or hospital. To best care for patients we must not only educate patients, but we must educate them in a non-persuasive, honest, trustworthy and ethical way. Loyalty is important when working with patients, to gain a patient's trust we must be honest with them and educate them about their condition or therapy without poisoning that education with persuasiveness or bias... middle of paper.... . .en. If I make a mistake at the pharmacy, I do everything I can to make up for that mistake. I educate the patient about the possible negative effects of our error, inform the provider, remedy the error and record it and the steps that led to the error to prevent it from happening again. By learning from our mistakes we hold ourselves to the highest standard of working an error-free day. While this goal may be theoretically unattainable, it is what we must aspire to as we work with human beings and not just profit margins. Pharmacy opened my eyes to what healthcare is truly about. It's not about making decisions in the best interests of us or the company we work for. Healthcare is about the patient. Health care is about educating people so they can make decisions about their bodies and receive specialized, personalized care.