Consulting is a common term in the business and finance sectors.  Being a successful consultant in the health care sector requires significantly different skills, experience, and attributes.  Consultant work ranges from mundane administrative tasks to extremely important policy implementation affecting the lives of millions of people.

What Does the Transition From Clinician to Consultant Involve?

Moving from clinical practice into healthcare consulting requires more than transferring clinical knowledge to a new environment. Clinicians bring valuable experience in problem-solving, stakeholder management, communication, prioritisation and evidence-based decision-making. These skills can be applied to consulting projects involving health service planning, program design, evaluation and healthcare improvement. The key transition is learning to apply frontline clinical experience to broader organisational, system and policy challenges while keeping recommendations practical and relevant.

From the perspective of a retail pharmacist, there are relevant, transferable skills including:

• Project management: In the pharmacy, daily, weekly, and monthly tasks are managed in order of crisis management first (patient health in danger) to routine activities that pass the time (stock rotation)
• Time management and prioritising: This is what pharmacists do when there are 20 scripts to be filled, ten customers waiting to speak to the pharmacist, and two phone calls to answer, all at once.
• Stakeholder management: Pharmacists manage stakeholders when there are 20 scripts to be filled accompanied by 20 sick and tired patients. Pharmacists are well placed to establish effective relationships with patients (i.e. stakeholders), built on trust and a mutual focus on what is important to the patient. Special relationships are established with repeat customers, with the pharmacist often becoming a key figure in their patients’ lives over the years.
• Analysing and Solving Problems: When, just before closing time, a new patient presents with a new condition, holding a prescription with a medication error, while the doctor is unable to be contacted and there are no other doctors or pharmacies around. What to do?
• Information management and computer skills: These days, a skilled pharmacist needs to be comfortable managing complex information and working across multiple dispensing and IT systems: Amfac, Minfos, Winifred, Lots, in addition to DAA systems, prescription reminder programs and automated dispensing robots.
• Business acumen: Retail pharmacists are in a unique position to understand the importance of budgeting, marketing and customer service, all while maintaining their focus on patient wellbeing.

Transferable Skills for Healthcare Consultants

A pharmacist moving into consulting can draw on many skills developed through frontline healthcare practice. Clinical reasoning, information management, stakeholder communication, project coordination and risk assessment can all contribute to effective consulting work. However, consulting also requires the ability to understand broader organisational priorities, work across disciplines and translate complex information into practical recommendations. This combination of clinical experience and consulting capability can provide valuable insight into healthcare projects and service improvement.

The frontline experience as a health professional is invaluable, and it underpins all consulting work with a critical question: is this practical?  As a consultant, however, you always need to go that extra step, think more broadly and cross the boundaries of methodology sectors or disciplines to develop a design or evaluate a program that responds to a difficult, complicated issue or deliver a project within a tight timeframe.

What Skills Does a Clinician Bring to Healthcare Consulting?

Clinicians can bring practical frontline knowledge to healthcare consulting, including clinical reasoning, problem-solving, stakeholder management, prioritisation and an understanding of patient needs. These skills can help consultants assess whether proposed strategies, programs or service changes are realistic in practice. For Larter, combining health professional experience with consulting methods helps connect evidence and strategy with the realities of healthcare delivery.

Conclusion

Moving from clinical practice into consulting does not mean leaving healthcare expertise behind. The experience gained through direct patient care can provide valuable insight into how healthcare services, programs and systems work in practice.

For clinicians considering consulting, skills such as problem-solving, prioritisation, stakeholder management, information analysis and communication can provide a strong foundation. The next step is learning how to apply those capabilities to broader organisational and healthcare challenges.

Frequently Asked Questions