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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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.
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