What do pharmacists do?
I know pharmacists dispense medication and find any prescription errors I’m just confused as to why they have to go through 8 years of school to do that. I was recently able to shadow a pharmacist and it seems as if the computer will alert the pharmacist if a medication prescription has an error in it. It also seems like the pharmacy techs are also able to count pills and because the computer flags any prescription errors the pharmacy tech could probably also fix any errors.
However I’m sure pharmacists do more than what I saw in my couple of hours of shadowing I’m just not sure what else they do. It would be kind of messed up if they went through 8 years of school just to count pills and have a computer do the rest so I imagine a pharmacist has responsibilities that goes beyond that.
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Depends your job. I have a friend that answers phone calls from doctors and patients all day, he has to talk about the drugs, give warnings and issues. I think also a big part is to try and identify any potential combinations of drugs that could be harmful that a doctor may have missed (as they prescribe based on symptoms). Pharmacists tend to need to know how the drugs interact with each other for safety by identifying risk factors.
They do lots of stuff. They do medication compounding, they have to know side effects of meds and which meds can interact together or not. Some places the pharmacist can prescribe meds like birth control and some types of antibiotics. There is a lot of information that they need to know.
This is I suppose less ELI5 and more just directly answering it, but I hope it is simple enough to still satisfy the curiosity.
Pharmacist and Pharmacy tech are different of course, you need a lot of school for the specific Pharmacist job. A job of a pharmacist entails a LOT of duties, and they have to learn how to do all of them. They need pharmacology knowledge (of course), they have to understand how drugs work, the potential side effects, interactions, and how to properly dose them. This is also so they can help customers/patients regarding any of these questions, there’s a LOT of drugs out there, and a LOT of complications. Heck, even some foods can have complications with certain medicines.
On top of this they also will almost act as a ‘double check’ for whatever the physician ordered. They can tell if a prescription is off a little, like perhaps the doctor miswrote something. Obviously this person who was prescribed 5mg of something does not need a 50mg dose every day.
The computers are good and only getting better of course, but sometimes human intervention is still required, especially so they can catch the more niche issues that an automated system might miss right off the bat, so they can review and make sure nothing slipped through
They can also ‘make’ custom medications in a sense. Such as if there is not a proper commercial drug available, they can mix stuff together to create the proper mix. This isn’t too common though since most pharmacies have just about every commercial drug you’d ever need.
This is more of in a hospital setting, but in emergency situations they are important to manage the proper medication for something acute, making sure it’s the proper drug and is administered properly.
Heck, even some pharmacists take part in pharmaceutical research to develop and test new medications. Pharmacists with their MANY years of training will usually educate pharmacy students, and even sometimes healthcare personnel.
And as a small tid-bit of extra info, they even *sometimes* are involved with developing health programs for local communities. This can also include vaccine awareness programs when a new flu vaccine is release and the pharmacist wants to ensure everyone gets it
TLDR: They are basically like comparing a general nurse to a full-fledged Dr. Sure, they both need knowledge and schooling, they both take care of patients, but the doctor is at the very top and has much more specific expertise and experience and overlooks everything important. Pharmacists are the ‘lords’ of medication. Which, when you might be dealing with a lot of different people, helping anyone you can with the proper information on whatever chemicals they’re taking is very important.
I think a decent analogy is to an airline pilot. These days a computer on a commercial airplane can fly the entire route from takeoff to landing. Yet there are still highly trained pilots on board. What do they do?
They oversee the operation of the airplane and are there to handle anything that might go wrong. They can recognize those edge cases where the computers get things wrong (which they do) and are ultimately those in charge and responsible for the aircraft.
Pharmacists are sort of like those pilots. The computers can recognize some problems with prescriptions, like dosages that are completely unreasonable, but not everything that a patient technically can take is a prescription that makes sense, or is in their best interests. That judgment is something computers really can’t do.
Furthermore pharmacists have a patient-facing role in that they advise and instruct the patient on how to take their medications. That way you avoid people spritzing their neck with their inhalers, or taking their blood pressure meds just whenever they feel like it.
Pharmacists are doctors, they have to obtain doctoral degrees and then pass additional certifications to become a pharmacist which takes quite a lot of study. They’re required to undergo advanced training because they need to understand the different drugs out there and how they work on a chemical level. They have to learn what treatments are effective for which conditions just like a GP or specialist doctor does, but instead of treating minor conditions like GPs or specific body systems like specialists do, they need to have specialist-level understanding of the function of each drug at their disposal in relation to the human body.
Decrypt doctor’s writing.
(Lots of other important stuff too. But this one, can’t be done by a computer (yet?))
What you observed was retail pharmacy, where the pharmacist working that shift has to be ready to answer any questions that come in from patients picking up their prescriptions, and any interactions or issues with fills that require communication with a doctors office, or with pharmaceutical companies directly. You may have not seen them “doing much” because it was a slow shift and patients didn’t have questions, and maybe any interactions that flagged in the computer were known (ie not new prescription fills) or low risk.
There are many different types of pharmacist jobs in addition to retail pharmacy, though. Hospitals employ a large number of clinical pharmacists that work closely with doctors and advise them on drug dosing or drug recommendations in complex situations. Many of the same specialties that exist for doctors also exist for pharmacists (like cancer care, or organ transplant, or cardiology, or infectious disease) to be able to subspecialize.
There are also industry pharmacist jobs working for large pharmaceutical companies on drug development and testing.
I think the same with doctors… in the U.K they have to follow NICE guidelines which are basically a set of instructions by the British government. So if you rock up with ‘depression’. The doctor will nod away and then go.. ‘I’ll put you on Sertaline’… that’s because the uk government has decided this is the cheapest option – option 1. This is basically ‘step one’ in a flow chart… 3 months later you go back and say ‘I’m still depressed’.., the doctor then consults the computer and says ‘ok, we’ll try another SSRI’… Doctors basically HAVE to follow this protocol… or risk being struck off the register… so you might as well deal with a computer .
I was considering going into pharmacy, and so I talked to some pharmacists.
Everything that other posters have said is true… but at least a couple of the pharmacists I talked to shared some of your concerns. There were like “You know a lot of stuff… but lots of times none of that matters because what you’re actually doing counting pills and doing inventory and dealing with old people complaining. You effectively do a lot of the same things, and have to interact with the same dumb managers, as the other retail workers at a grocery store”.
You could also own your own pharmacy in some small town, which is apparently the simplest way to make a lot of money. The pharmacist I talked to who owned (three) pharmacies was happy with money, but was candid that lots of his job was just “running a retail store that just had an extra reason that it’s profitable”. So a lot of hiring/firing/managing, and deciding how many snowglobes to order.
Or you could work in a hospital. This was apparently the best way to feel like you’re really using your knowledge and participating in improving health care outcomes. This is the most “being a pharmacist” and the least “being a retail worker/manager”. (I didn’t actually talk to one of these pharmacists, but the other pharmacists mentioned this possibility).
You can learn more about it from watching this guy’s videos:
[https://www.youtube.com/@millennialrx](https://www.youtube.com/@millennialrx)
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