what do pharmacists do?

Question

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.

In: Other

Answer 1

Hospital pharmacist here chiming in. I work primarily in the IV room which is a super sterile environment in which we compound IV medications. I need to know the ins and outs of stability of a drug when it’s mixed in solution vs sterility of the drug in terms of how it’s mixed. I mix drugs and verify that they are made correctly.

Nurses and physicians come to us for questions when it comes to medication compatibility and such (can you run two different medication infusions at the same time?)

In terms of having the system flagging stuff already for us, remember that we always have human judgement. For example, a patient has morphine listed as an allergy. Yet, they’ve tolerated morphine for their last 6 administrations and when asked about it, they say it gives them nausea. That’s not a true anaphylactic allergy and the patient can be given morphine while being monitored. On the other hand, the computer would flat out say “no this patient can’t have morphine, period.”

Now on to the eli5. I get paid money to prevent doctors and nurses from killing patients. I also mix medicine. I answer a lot of the questions from doctors and nurses and if I don’t know the answer, I know where to look it up efficiently.