Read the thread from 5 years ago, get that we need people with expertise in medicine _at some point_ in the chain of care, but unclear why it all needs to be at the end.
Background: finding myself needing to visit the pharmacy quite frequently for prescriptions for family members (so no opportunity to visually inspect the patient), whenever the pharmacist goes over dosages and instructions, it’s nearly verbatim what’s printed and in the bag, and it’s always pills. Seems like you could have the pharmacists that check for bad interractions in some pharmacy Mission Control, and my small bottles of pills could be assembled from big bottles of pills by a machine.
In: 0
>whenever the pharmacist goes over dosages and instructions, it’s nearly verbatim what’s printed and in the bag, and it’s always pills.
In addition to what others have said, pharmacists exist to make sure *every* patient receives the proper care and knows how to take their medication. Not everyone will be getting pills, and some patients will need further explanation than what is printed on their bottle for any number of reasons.
Some patients may have difficulty reading the bottle either due to poor eyesight or difficulty with the language. Patient consultation is a great place to catch that the language used on the bottle is not the patient’s native language and may need translation. Additionally, not every patient has the same level of education. Pharmacists are trained to write instructions out as simply and accurately as they can so they can be used by patients of all education levels, but there will still be opportunities for confusion. For example, compare “Take 1 tablet by mouth twice daily” with “Take 1 tablet by mouth two times per day” and “Take 1 tablet by mouth every 12 hours.” Those should all be equivalent, but patients may interpret them differently.
Some patients may have difficulty with measurements for liquid medications. I know that one teaspoonful is five milliliters, but not every patient knows that or how to measure it out. I once had a patient who misunderstood their instructions and was taking 1.5 teaspoonsful per dose instead of 1.5 milliliters per dose, five times as much. It was written correctly on the bottle, but they were far more accustomed to imperial measurements than metric.
(I worked as a pharmacy technician for about fifteen years.)
Latest Answers