Have you ever felt like you’re hitting a brick wall when you’re preparing for your pre-reg exams?
Online resources are readily available to help with this, and one platform has been making strides in providing both educational and other pharmacy-related content over the past five years to support pharmacists in the UK and beyond.
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MicroPharm is run by Yasir Sacranie, a hospital pharmacist who set up the online educational platform that provides study guides, GPhC-style questions, webinars, and mentorship programs to help students in their exams.
Despite boasting nearly 12,000 YouTube subscribers and over 1.8m video views, alongside a combined Instagram and TikTok following of over 175,000, the journey to creating a successful educational pharmacy platform has taken a while.
A family affair
Sacranie completed his MPharm at De Montfort University and was “always fairly confident” he wanted to study pharmacy as his brother is a pharmacist and a lot of his cousins are too.
Some of his extended family own pharmacies and growing up in this environment helped Sacranie realise it “is a good career” and even after being rejected at the first time of applying, he retook his A-Levels and got into De Montfort, which was commutable for Sacranie to study at from home.
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After graduating, he went into community pharmacy before going into hospital pharmacy in 2017 where his friends said “they were loving it”.
In 2019, his role changed at the University Hospital of Leicester, when he became a specialist antimicrobial pharmacist and also a teacher practitioner, splitting his time between the hospital and university.
This was the year Sacranie went into content creation as he started to make videos online “as a way for me to see if I’m any good at teaching”.
He was inspired a lot by online educational platform Khan Academy, which has well over 10m followers across all social media channels, including 8.63m on YouTube alone where they regularly post free educational videos on a range of subjects.
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Sacranie saw that something similar could be done in pharmacy, so he started making videos alongside his roles on social media and “it picked up steam”.
Sacranie started making content about his diabetes type 1 experience, as well as offering pharmacy insight videos such as his popular ‘how much money I make as a junior hospital pharmacist’ and ‘would I recommend studying pharmacy in 2023’.
Show me the money
But he realised it was “very time consuming and very expensive” to do, so he wanted to make sure revenue could be made from it all.
“That’s when I started putting together study guides and crash courses for trainee pharmacists,” Sacranie says, adding the “stakes are very high” for trainees when they have to do a lot of self-directed study before they sit their exams.
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“I knew the audience quite well because I teach them at the hospital,” he adds. “I love what I do, and I want it to be universal training for everyone in the pharmacy profession.”
Starting on social media before creating the paid-for courses helped Sacranie “create an organic following for people who are genuinely interested” in seeking out pharmacy content, and he advises other people this is a good way to start a business first.
And even with a business model set up now, Sacranie says 98% of his content is free and 2% has a paywall, as the model he uses is “learnt from a lot of people in this space” who did similar educational content.
“The 2% paying allow me to create free content, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
MicroPharm has taught over 5,000 trainee pharmacists so far, but a lot of Sacranie’s online content has adapted to meet his growing audience.
“I get patients that have been prescribed medication but don’t understand it. Those people who watch my content want to learn about their medication, but they’re less likely to buy anything.
@micropharm 3 things to know about doxycycline 💊 #fyp #pharmacy #foryoupage #medicine ♬ Chill Vibes - Tollan Kim
“What that means is, the audience grows [but] you’re less likely to receive customers. What my aim is to get to a position where the platforms themselves will provide some form of monetisation to allow you to continue to grow.”
Sacranie has only started monetising for two months so far on YouTube and has made £51 as of mid-October 2024. He warns people who want to go into content creation that the money can be very low to begin with.
“A lot of peers I meet are on the millions because they’re teaching at mass scale. So in order to get to that stage, I'm working towards where I don't really need to sell anything to an audience.
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“I want to get to a position where I continue to teach at scale. My whole aim of the monetisation of teaching healthcare professionals is [so] I can actually teach my audience for free.”
It’s common to not be paid much at all when using YouTube or Instagram to monetise your content, but Sacranie says TikTok is a better as “their argument is ‘we will get your content out there much better than other platforms’, and I do think they deliver on that promise”.
One of Sacranie’s most popular videos, and the ones he enjoys putting together the most, is his ‘a day in the life’ content.
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He’s found it’s “shone a light on what hospital pharmacists actually do” and people build an appreciation for pharmacists outside if thinking “they just check boxes” most of the time.
But these often “take the longest when it comes to editing”, with a 30 second video taking around one hour to edit “if you’re doing it well”, and long-form explanation videos taking between “three to four hours”.
@micropharm A day in my life as a pharmacist 💊 #explorepage #explore #pharmacist ♬ BACKBONE - Chase & Status & Stormzy
Sacranie has plans to expand and grow his business to more pharmacy students and qualified pharmacists who only follow him on social media but don’t access any training - yet.
MicroPharm has grown so much that there are sixteen part-time staff members now. Many of the team work full time outside of MicroPharm, but are “passionate about teaching”. They are paid to do help teach the MicroPharm courses, even though Sacranie has worked with people who “are willing to do it for free just to build up their CV”.
Having others teach the course has helped Sacranie “spend time growing the platform than teaching something that’s not my specialist area”, and other team members manage social media, edit content, and a current MPharm student has recently joined to produce more content creation.
Pharmacists the next trailblazers?
But managing his team between lecturing, working in the hospital, and doing content creation was “really tough” and Sacranie understands it “puts off a lot of people” as people would “carry on working full time whilst doing something and consider it a hobby”.
“If you’re passionate about it, it’s generally not a problem,” Sacranie says, as he often found himself doing fifteen to twenty hours of content creation each week on top of his full-time workload.
He did this for two years until he could cut down his hours to four days a week, and now works two days a week in his hospital pharmacy role and is a visiting lecturer which has cut down his hours too.
Sacranie feels it has all been worth it as the opportunities he has had from MicroPharm’s educational content have not been because of his role, but because of the content creation he does.
For instance, he spoke about his antimicrobial pharmacy specialism at a House of Lords panel which felt like a big achievement to go “from a small Instagram page, and you've got some level of national recognition”.
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He has joined TikTok’s Clinician Creator Network this month, a group which aims to create reliable health information accessible on TikTok.
He believes medics and nurses are “the trailblazers” in the healthcare content creation space and says we “need to get more pharmacists on these platforms to show their voices”.
Sacranie has had lots of pharmacy students reach out to him for advice as they are keen to document their journey as pharmacy students, and he believes this is a positive thing for the profession.
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“You get taught a lot about the dangers of social media. However, there's very little spoken about the value of social media and how we can use it for good.
“As a whole and as a profession, if we start to recognise the positive aspects of social media, then I think more people will adopt it.”
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