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
Everything you have just typed can ( and might have been) written by a bot.
It’s kind of messed up if you went through years of learning to read and write just to have a computer randomly produce something similar.
But just as you’re able to discuss points, a pharmacist is able to use their experience when dispensing medication
Pharmacists, particularly in hospitals, actually formulate and mix drugs… grind pills in an exact formula to create an iv med, or to formulate an appropriate dosage for a tiny baby. And of course some pharmacists work in research creating and testing new drugs. Many pharmacists work at local pharmacies, but there are other spaces they fork in, too.
When people have concerns over their medications and it takes forever to get in contact with their doctor, people appreciate having someone with 8 years of education that they can go to get advice (retail pharmacy).
Also considering that some medications can cause serious health complications if taken incorrectly or with meds they shouldn’t take together, you want someone who knows their stuff to be the one doing the final “yes this is the correct med in the bottle” or “yes these instructions make sense with this medication”.
Had a patient who needed to go to a different pharmacy for a specific med that was out of stock and they didn’t ask if he took a big one that you shouldn’t take together and he ended up in the hospital. Computer wouldn’t catch that without his med history. Both the prescribing doctor and pharmacist should have asked if he took this specific med also :/
Even people with also that education make mistakes but imagine all the mistakes if say the technician could answer questions that right now only a pharmacist could answer.
The amount of learning I’ve done for being a technician is not enough to feel comfortable with giving anyone medication advice.
My brother is a pharmacist and I wish he was here to answer this!
But while pharmacists do sometimes do “bot like” work (although that’s more frequently assigned to pharmacy techs), in large part they’re there to understand how drugs work at a level that an MD *doesn’t*.
For instance, an MD might prescribe a drug that has a terrible interaction with another drug a patient is taking…or is counter indicated for a condition that patient has. The pharmacist’s job is to catch this before it can harm the patient. (Which takes a phenomenal level of understanding of what a wide variety of drugs do – both on their own and in conjunction with other drugs and human biochemistry.)
So it’s not just, “the physician ordered 500 mg of this when 50 mg is the highest dose a human should take”. It’s also, “this patient has liver failure, so giving them this drug might kill them” (which the doctor either might not have known because many doctors treat each part of their patient as a separate thing without considering the whole – or might have known, just didn’t know that this was a bad drug for people with failing livers because even an MD only knows so much).
(FWIW, my brother regularly has to call doctors to be like, “WTF? This medication will kill this patient!” That’s particularly true in cases where a patient has a number of illnesses and is on multiple drugs.)
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.
Even a pharmacy tech can be a challenging job. My cousin mixes chemo drugs. My sister in law orders all the drugs and if she messes up and orders the wrong thing, someone will not get their chemo treatment.
Just to add different perspective to all the other answers.
I’m an anesthesiologist. I’m pretty much the only type of professional who prescribes, dispenses, *and* administers medicines. I figured out what the patient needs and just pull it out and give it to them. On top of that, I need to understand and work with *every* medicine a patient might be on, at home or in the hospital, because of all the other stuff I’m doing to them for the whole anesthesia thing.
In that respect, I have to be an expert on a *lot* of different aspects of a *lot* of different medicines.
Even still, pharmacists know *so much more* about medications than I do that it’s *ridiculous*. They’re the people I go to with questions about interaction, dosages, dosing adjustments, and indications.
Pharmacists are the bomb.
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
In the UK, pharmacists are able to talk to people and recommend over the counter treatments for everyday ailments, or signpost them to other services. They can prescribe some medication without needing to see a GP, give emergency contraception, take your blood pressure.
Because the waiting lists for GP appointments can be so long, pharmacists can see patients for minor stuff like ear infections, UTIs etc, for more serious cases they’ll advise you see a GP. this in-community care is part of a scheme to get people to stop asking for doctors appointments for ailments that can be treated over the counter, to save those appointments for more serious cases.
It also depends on the type of pharmacist. My wife is a clinical pharmacist and it makes a ton of sense for her to go through that much schooling for the job she does, along with 2 years of residency, one general and one specialized. Under a collaborative practice agreement, pharmacists in her capacity can actually prescribe medication under certain circumstances.
Latest Answers