Hi! My name is Sharon. Thank you for visiting my page and thinking about purchasing or subscribing to my tutorials.
Here's a little about myself:
I spent a fair number of years of my life studying at the University of London School of Pharmacy ('the Square') which is where I did a BPharm (1996) and a PhD in Pharmacognosy (2003).
I have worked as a locum pharmacist in a number of different locations across the UK in community and hospital pharmacies. I worked briefly as a trainee senior pharmacist specialising in Clinical Governance, one of the roles of which included organization of continuing professional development type departmental meetings with specialist speakers. It was brief because I had to relocate to HK for family reasons.
After passing the HK registration exams (2012) I taught for three years at vocational colleges (IVE and Caritas) teaching evening courses on pharmacology and human disease topics to pharmacy technicians and student nurses. This involved writing and researching my own lecture and teaching material, as well as exam questions and answers which I would mark. This is where I got the most of my insight into how exam questions are structured and marked.
I started the Facebook group in 2011/12 when I was in the process of studying for the exams as a kind of support group, and have kept it going since then. I post exam tips and topical posts, and it is a good way to interact with myself and others as well.
I started writing these tutorials in 2017, just as an experiment to begin with then found out there was a real need for them as exam candidates used them as guidance and support. It is actually a mutually beneficial arrangement as I am a bit of a CPD nerd, and I hope they provide a source of continuing professional development as a side benefit, as well as promote the importance of health education and pharmacy as a profession.
For each exam past paper I spend around one month to research and structure the answers, drawing from my own past clinical pharmacy and research experiences. I also upkeep them when I see updates need to be made (eg if there are new guidelines). I include links to the references used (many of which are clickable) and try to stick to a few basic internationally accepted references such as the BNF, the electronics Medicines Compendium, and Hong Kong based references such as IMPACT. I also have a sister who is a medical doctor who does research and specialises in infectious diseases and hepatitis, which comes in handy when looking into the ID type questions!
This is still a growing and evolving project, and you may come across some kinks which need to be ironed out for which I hope you can be patient with and let me know about.
I truly hope that you find these tutorials helpful in the preparation for your exams!