What is a Pharmacy Technician? – Learn Why This Is The Career For You
When looking into how to become a pharmacy technician, the first question you should ask is: What is a pharmacy technician? That is a very good question, and one that a lot of people always ask when trying to get into the business. However, there is no real straight answer to this question, as a pharmacy technician’s duties are different from place to place.
Most people think that you would only find a pharmacy tech in a pharmacy; even though that is one of the most common places for them to work, that is hardly the only place that you will find them.
What is a Pharmacy Technician – A Short List of The Places That Pharmacy Technicians Work
- Retail Pharmacy
- Hospital Pharmacy
- Long Term Care Pharmacy
- Home Infusion Pharmacy
- Nuclear Pharmacy
A lot of the duties in most of these places will over lap; which makes it easy for technicians to transfer to different environments to work in. The more experience you get in different settings the higher your potential pay can be, as well as the more versatile you are in your chosen profession. That means, if you decided to take the next step, and become a pharmacist, you will not have a problem choosing where you would rather work.
However, because of all the details in each different job setting, we will talk about the two most common places you will find yourself working; retail pharmacy and a hospital pharmacy.
Retail pharmacies are the most common place you are going to find any pharmacy technician working; as well as the first place they will likely start. Every state has different laws as to what a pharm tech can do in the work places.
What is a pharmacy technician in a retail pharmacy? Here is a quick run down:
- Collecting insurance and personal information on the patient
- Processing patient prescriptions into a computer system
- Filling out requests for refills from doctor offices
- Order medications; making sure stocks do not get too low
- Restocking shelves; both in front of and behind the counter.
- Answering incoming phone calls
- Making sure that payments for medications are approved by patients insurance companies
Those are the most common tasks that are performed by a pharmacy technician in a retail work environment. And as you can see, the pharmacy technician does a lot of the technical side of things, sprinkled with quite a bit of admin and office work. This frees up the pharmacist to deal more with the patients and informing them about their medications.
When it comes to a hospital pharmacy; some of the duties are the same, while there are quite a few different ones as well that must be performed.
- Filling new orders; oral medications and special sterile compound meds; this includes chemo medications
- tubing medications; if the hospital has a tube station
- delivering medications
- if some floors have floor pharmacists then a tech will help with medication histories and IV drip checks.
- Billing for medications when a nursing chart does not
- making sure all controlled substances are accounted for throughout the hospital
As you can see, when it comes to the hospital setting of a pharmacy technician, they are more or less the medication distributors. They are the go to people for medication; almost a lot like medication delivery people.
So what is a pharmacy technician? Well, as you may have read, they are the assistants to the pharmacist. They do most of the menial tasks that the pharmacist should not have to do. But as you can see, there are some different tasks involved in each different setting; you deal more with patients in a retail setting, with some phone contact with doctor offices. Where in the hospital setting you will notice you deal a lot with nurses and doctors face to face, with only a moderate amount of patient contact. In the retail you will get to know people by name, because most people you see will be from the neighborhood that the pharmacy is located it. But with the hospital setting, you will see so many different people, that it would be impractical to get to know them on a first name basis.
This page should have easily answered the question: What is a Pharmacy Technician?