What have I learned concerning pharmacy practice that I did not know prior to taking this course? This was a serious question to ask myself when beginning to write this paper since I have been working in the pharmacy profession for the past 20 years. I believe as if this course had been a refresher course for me and actually brought me back to my training days while I was new to the practice of pharmacy. It has been good to expound some of my experience to the others in my class. It is very important to keep in mind where you came from as well as where you are now in your vocation objectives.
A pharmacy technician should be vigilant, dependable, attentive, and devoted. Since pharmacy technicians back the job of pharmacists, pharmacy technicians have to be capable to follow directions appropriately. Precision as well as attention to detail are essential for pharmacy technicians because it may be an issue of life or death for a patient. Although a pharmacist will verify the job of a pharmacy technician, technicians should be able to work alone without continuous instruction from a pharmacist.
As there is a great deal of communication with patients, coworkers, and healthcare experts, strong interpersonal as well as interaction abilities are required in a pharmacy setting. Team effort and collaboration in a pharmacy setting is very important since pharmacy technicians are often required to work with other pharmacists, aids, and technicians. Pharmacy technicians must defend the patient’s confidentiality. Each health care setting takes a patient’s confidentiality extremely seriously.
A patient’s privacy rights are that the conversation of patient’s treatment, medical conditions, personal information, and medicines, outside the pharmacy is prohibited. The non-pharmacy staff, administrative staff, or surrounding customers should on no account overhear a patient’s information. The importance of the patient’s discretion and privacy cannot be over emphasized. Not only is ID theft on a serious rise, but medical insurance ID theft is increasing at an alarming rate. Pharmacy technicians are crucial support staff for the licensed pharmacists.
Technicians support their pharmacists in carrying out their most significant role of providing appropriately and correctly prepared medicines to patients. Pharmacy technicians help pharmacists in checking for possible interactions and incompatibilities, filling prescriptions for drugs, and evaluating medication orders for drug allergies, and dosing as part of the team. Technicians also help by labeling, delivering, measuring, mixing, and packaging medicines for patients while at the same time maintaining automated lists of medicines and working with a pharmacist to make sure that the five rights of every patient is met.
The patient has the right to receive the correct dose, the correct medicine, and the right route or delivery method at the right time. Above all making sure it is the right patient. Pharmacy technicians are also responsible for transporting medicines and other pharmacy equipment to and from patient units and medication rooms, medicine delivery services, responding queries pertaining to non-drug products. They are also responsible for cleaning and sterilizing dispensing equipment, instruments and bottles and contacting doctors’ offices for medicine refills or prescription clarifications.
As pharmacy technicians team up with pharmacists, they are needed to work the same hours as pharmacists. This may incorporate evenings, nights, holidays, and weekends. Pharmacy technicians may work in different shifts, as hospitals and some retail pharmacies are open 24 hours a day. As their seniority boosts, pharmacy technicians frequently have better control over their working hours. Pharmacy technicians work in clean, organized, well-lit, as well as well-ventilated areas and spend much of their time on their feet.
They may also be required to utilize stepladders to lift weighty boxes or get back supplies from high shelves. Pharmacy staff takes part in quality guarantee, medicine use assessment programs, as well as continuously evaluate the pharmacy’s drug inventory for expired, recalled, as well as withdrawn, medicines. Pharmacy technicians also carry out daily task for example labeling bottles and pill counting correctly to guarantee every patient gets the right medicine in the correct measure with the right directions and warnings appropriately listed on the bottle.
The development of health care in the present day as well as in the expected future is moving more towards an integrated and managed health care system, pharmacy staff is obliged to agree to the duty to supply pharmaceutical service to patients. Pharmaceutical service is an ever developing type of pharmacy practice wherein cooperation between other health care professionals and the pharmacists take a dynamic role in selecting medicines correctly, effectively distributing medications to patients, and by making sure the patient is competent and accountable to achieve the preferred results of their drug treatment.
Pharmacy education enables the pharmacist to share responsibility for the results of pharmacotherapy as well as to work together with other health care experts. It advances the skills, values, abilities, and understanding essential to supply pharmaceutical attention for the extensive practice of pharmacy in a range of settings. The career must advance to improve the extensive practice of pharmacy to advance the objectives of education in pharmacy practice, quality, as well as research in institutional and non-institutional pharmacy settings.
Robotics, automations, and well-educated pharmacy technicians are increasingly carrying out activities of the pharmacist; this has permitted, and will continue to permit pharmacists to concentrate on pharmaceutical care activities. This increasing role further draws attention to the requirement for more training for pharmacists. Certified pharmacy education programs will allow for the regularity of education as well as pharmacist training. The future of pharmacy relies a good deal on the delivery of complete and wide-ranging pharmaceutical attention, with services being concentrated on the result of a patient’s drug treatment.
In the future, we will see more complex treatments accompanied by the aging population. My thought is that the current pharmacies used will differ in some measure to develop into restricted clinic data gathering sites as well. More than just providing prescriptions, I believe there may eventually exist certain clinical tests that are device-based and will be supplied and performed at the local pharmacy. The information gathered from these tests will then be conveyed to a medical doctor directly through a secure data transfer process.
I believe the patient care partnerships between medical doctors and pharmacists will continue to increase as this will provide a quick exchange of information concerning the monitoring as well as care of patients. The pharmacist will eventually be present in the physician office to help determine the medication therapy. At this time, with programs such as Medicare Part D, patients are going to need help and education understanding not only the health insurance and policy problems, but also their different disease states.
In recent times people are living longer as well living longer with chronic illnesses for example diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and congestive heart failure. As people are living longer, they will be on constant medicines and will be more prone to medicine interactions and difficulties to adherence to certain medicines, as well as side effects. For pharmacists, there is going to be an enormous requirement in really helping manage these people, to treat them as persons. No one provider can perform it all the way healthcare is going at present.
There must be a team effort and the patient must provide each of their providers with the information from each of them. Healthcare in common is starting to turn out to be integrated as well as will continue to do so over in the following years. As these advances are made, society will turn out to be increasingly technology driven and technology literate. Technology has already infiltrated into pharmacy and soon will be completely deployed to dispense most prescriptions, provide treatment information to patients, and maintain the progress of the exchange of patient-specific data between each of the health care providers for the patient.