What happens between my doctor sending a prescription to the pharmacy and me picking it up?
Does the pharmacy just have every single potential prescription sitting in the back and they count and portion it out as the order is received? Do they “make” any of the medicine on site? Seems unlikely for the pills with designated colors and markings.
And if a significant portion of the job is counting pills why do pharmacists require so much schooling?
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For the most part, yes. Pharmacies do stock the majority of medicines people are likely to have prescribed. They use decades of statistics to try to predict how much stock they need to keep of them. Part of how this works is pills just don’t take up a lot of space. A giant bottle with 5,000 of a pill isn’t *that much* larger than the bottle you get with 10-50 pills inside, and it can dispense up to 500 bottles.
Meanwhile, all of it is tracked, since we’re talking about drugs. The pharmacy has a more accurate count of every pill it has than any other part of a store. So it’s very clear when that 5,000 pill bottle is getting kind of low, and there’s plenty of data to tell the pharmacy when it’s low enough to reorder.
Also, chain pharmacies can move stock around. If one pharmacy needs to fill something they don’t have, but a pharmacy somewhere else in the city has it, they can either transfer the prescription or get the medicine delivered. This can cause a delay, but sometimes it’s fast enough patients don’t really notice.
That said, sometimes they’re just out. There have been a lot of medicine shortages over the last few years while people pretend everything’s fine. It’s left a lot of people with no real way to get the medicine from a local pharmacy at all. But even outside of shortages, I occasionally have to travel to a different pharmacy from my usual one because they indicate what I need is sort of “rare” and the other pharmacy is the only one that stocks it.
> And if a significant portion of the job is counting pills why do pharmacists require so much schooling?
Oh no. Not at all. “Counting pills” is just the tedious part of the job, it’s like arguing “all a doctor does is paperwork”.
The pharmacist is supposed to be well-trained in a VERY wide variety of medicines. Some doctors can specialize into certain kinds of drugs, but pharmacists have to study them all. They are supposed to know dosage requirements and interactions VERY well, and what they don’t have memorized they’re supposed to be able to look up and research very quickly.
The reason is sometimes a doctor doesn’t remember *everything* about a patient. Maybe the family doctor misses on the chart that a patient is taking something prescribed by a specialist. That could lead the doctor to prescribe a drug that interacts with the other one. The pharmacist is ONLY focused on, “What medicines are this patient taking, and why?”, so they’re less likely to miss something. They can notice, “Oops, your doctor probably didn’t mean this, let me call him and double-check.” Usually that results in the two hacking out an alternative, or in rare cases the doctor explaining they understand the risks but have a reason for this prescription.
Meanwhile the pharmacist is also supposed to understand the side effects and interactions the medicine your taking could have and is often required by law to explain them to you. My pharmacy’s policy will NOT let the employees give me a medication until the pharmacist scans their badge and speaks to me about the medications. They can’t even take my money without that.
That’s what the pharmacist is trained for. They are supposed to be at least as well-versed in ALL drugs as any doctor you see, because they are the last person who gets to double-check for safety issues. Even the “technicians” who work for the pharmacist require some degree of medical training just as an extra safety net. They aren’t trained *enough* to be *responsible* for the final decisions, but they are trained enough to catch big mistakes and to know better than to take the shortcuts people who get paid far less tend to be tempted to make.
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