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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Well… There is a lot to it. Many of the other comments have alluded to part of the job.
Here are 2 flow charts showing the process of filling 1 prescription: [ Flow Chart 1](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Flow-diagram-of-the-community-pharmacy-dispensing-procedures-analyzed-with-SAFPHR-The_fig2_340433325)/ [ Flow Chart 2](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20554/figure/A4213/)
That process must be done for every script and most pharmacies process between 300-800 daily.
# Retail Pharmacist duties:
* Every job a technician does is also the responsibility of the pharmacist. How often they are done depends on staffing
* data entry verification
* Verify the right drug is in the right bottle with the correct label for the correct patient in the correct quantity.
* DUR -Drug Utilization Review – ensuring it is the right drug/dose for the patient (adult/kid, male/female, pregnant/not pregnant). Making sure it doesn’t interact with a different medication. If it does interact, what is the interaction, and what needs to be done? Change med, change dose, counsel patient of what may happen.
* documenting drug or dose change so we can counsel on it to make sure you were expecting the change
* informing you if we change manufacturers so you know it will look different
* Counseling on medications- do you know how to use it correctly? If you do it wrong what happens? We want to help but sometimes you need more info so it works right.
* medication reconciliation- when you end up in the hospital and they need your medication list they call us to get the info
* above but the same thing happens when you end up in jail. Yes, the jail will call your pharmacy and the pharmacy will know you were arrested. Yes, we will look it up online to see what you did.
* transfer scripts between pharmacies
* call doctors when they write scripts wrong – it happens WAY more often than you think it does.
* Immunizations- COVID, Flu, pneumonia, tetanus, hepatitis, shingles, RSV, MMR, Varicella etc
* knowing who gets which of the above vaccinations in which circumstances based on multiple different factors
* In some states checking: glucose, cholesterol, A1C , and HIV .
* In some states covid test, stept tests, flu tests – Yes, this includes performing a basic check of vitals, then doing the actual swab, and running a test to see if it is positive. Then prescribing antibiotics/antivirals as needed.
* In some states authorization of birth control scripts
* Answering stupid questions- yes some questions are stupid
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