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Pharmacy Technician Job Role
By Ashley Boyce, an allied health world staff writer
Published: January 7th, 2010
What do pharmacy techs do?
In the course of an ordinary day, pharmacy techs are kept very busy with routine pharmacy work that would include typing prescriptions from doctors’ longhand script for the maintenance of pharmacy and patient records. This has the benefit of making the information more legible while putting it into a universal format, all for the sake of making the information more quickly and easily accessible to the patient and other members of the pharmacy staff.Pharmacy techs are tasked with refilling prescriptions or filling newly written prescriptions that come in as either traditional hand-written script or by fax
or email from the doctor’s office directly. Techs are responsible for verifying the prescription for completeness and accuracy and very often contact the doctor who wrote the prescription to verify information or to confirm its legitimacy if it seems in any way unusual.When a prescription is for pre-stocked drugs that have been packaged by the pharmaceutical company that manufactured them, the pharmacy tech simply pulls them from the shelf, verifies the quantity and potency is consistent with the prescription, tracks the in-house inventory, and rings the customer out.
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Pharmacies, however, also stock bulk inventory on many commonly prescribed drugs and antibiotics. When a pharmacy tech is filling a prescription for a medicine or antibiotic from the pharmacies bulk supply, the tech has the added responsibility of isolating the dosage and potency specified on the prescription and either weighing or measuring the medicine if it is a liquid or ointment, or counting out the specified number of pills or capsules. The tech then prepares the prescription label which includes specific instructions to the patient on the size of the dose, and on how many times it should be taken or administered daily. Labels also include warnings about the side affects of a drug either alone or in combination with other drugs or alcohol which could include drowsiness and impair patients’ ability to drive or operate machinery. Other common auxiliary labels would include instructions to take the drug with food or milk to avoid nausea or upset stomach.
Pharmacy techs also act as the liaison between patients and their doctors and insurance companies. Insurance companies may not cover a certain prescription which puts the burden of payment onto the patient. This puts the patient in the awkward position of having to decide between their health and their finances. In these instances, pharmacy techs would determine what similar medication the insurance company is willing to pay for, and would then contact the doctor who wrote the original prescription to see if he agrees that the substitute is suitable, and is willing to re-write the prescription accordingly.
Learn more about pharmacy technician training.
chs in retail pharmacies also answer phone calls that are usually from patients who wish to confirm the availability of certain prescription drugs at the pharmacy. They also handle money and ring the patient out for their prescription drug purchases. There is little down-time in a retail pharmacy, even when there are no customers to serve, the pharmacy tech will stay busy stocking shelves with pre-stocked pharmaceuticals, performing data entry, and verifying inventory records are being properly maintained.
What are the unique tasks of hospital or in-facility pharmacy techs?
Hospitals have their own in-facility pharmacies because of the convenience to patients being discharged from the medical facility who need prescription antibiotics, pain killers, or other pharmaceuticals. The most important reason, however, for maintaining an in-facility pharmacy in hospitals, assisted living facilities, or nursing homes is to provide the drugs that patients or long-term residents need while in the care of the facility. The drugs provided to in-facility patients are often administered as an IV drip. Preparing an IV drip is unique to the work of a hospital or in-facility pharmacy.Learn more about pharmacy technician career path.
Pharmacy techs in these settings would be responsible for reading patients’ charts that would include doctors’ prescriptions to determine patients’ pharmaceutical needs. They would then allocate or prepare the medicine accordingly. Techs may even deliver medicine to patients after the pharmacist has confirmed prescriptions were filled accurately. They would then record the specific drug type and potency for patients’ medical files.
Medicine for in-facility patients is often prepared by pharmacy techs to provide for their medicinal needs for the entire day. This has the obvious benefit of increasing efficiency and reducing the likelihood that a patient will receive too much or too little medicine in the course of a day as might occur if it was prepared at different times or by different pharmacy techs. Pharmacy techs prepare the 24-hour supply of medicine, packaging and labeling each dose separately to make it more easily identified and administered by a doctor or nurse. The daily supply is securely stored in a locked medicine cabinet specific to each patient until the on-site pharmacist can verify it was prepared correctly, at which point it is made available to the hospital medical staff to administer.
Hospital pharmacies typically stay open 24 hours a day to coincide with the hours the hospital is open. This, of course, means that pharmacy techs working in hospitals would be subject to non-standard shift scheduling that could include nights.