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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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.
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