Essay On Refill Workflow

Taking 30 seconds to update a patient profile will be such a small task in the grand scheme of things. I will make sure that all the technicians have patients verify name, birthday, and address because I’ve witness patients being given the wrong medication more times than I would like to actually admit to. As a practicing pharmacist you should inform your technicians that making sure the patient is given the right medication is very crucial to you. Regardless of how of busy your pharmacy may be, you must ensure that patients are given the correct

When I get older and advance in my career, I would like to be a Certified Pharmacy Technician. Pharmacy Technician is a health care provider who provides pharmacy related functions to people who need medication. We can also work for long-term facilities, third party insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufactures. A pharmacy technician job is never an easy job. Maybe one day I could even become a Pharmacist. A pharmacist is the person who writes prescriptions, knows what drug a client needs and can diagnose a person. Where on the other hand, a pharmacy technician works under them. We give out and sort the medication. A pharmacy technician cannot diagnose a patient. I plan to work hard and get my certifications to get to where they are so I will be able to diagnose people and have that title.

“Handwriting has always been, and will remain, a problem in medicine. A 1979 study showed that it was difficult to interpret about half of all physicians' handwritten orders. Little has changed since then,” (In the long run, penmanship classes for doctors won't do much for patient safety, 2001). This has been an ongoing problem since inception. Therefore, the beginning of the process should be changed in this day and age of technology to have prescriptions entered into computers and handheld devices by the doctor, to ensure accuracy of the medication that is needed to be filled, and electronically sent to the pharmacy. Having a nurse call in prescriptions is a non-value added activity that can be eliminated. This may be expensive at the start to implement, but in the long term, it will save both organizations time, help reduce errors, and add value to the level of service the organization gives. With this change, label errors should also be reduced as well, ensuring the patient receives the correct medicine and dosage.

My goal is to become a certified Pharmacy Technician. I am pursuing this goal by enrolling in West-Mec’s Pharmacy Technician program. A few requirements to getting a job as a Pharmacy Tech is that you have to be at least 18 years old with a high school diploma or a GED and have passed the Pharmacy Technician Certification Examination(PTCE) test and be licensed in your state. On the job training is typical. There are many benefits to being a Pharmacy Technician. First, Pharmacy is an ever-growing field. More and more jobs are becoming available every day. So, it won’t be too difficult to get a job once you are certified and licensed. One statistic stated that, “Pharmacy Technician jobs should grow by 20% through the year 2022.” () Another benefit

One of the first steps to becoming pharmacy technicians requires you to have your high school or GED, it is also required that you at least be 18 years of age and have no felony recorded, passing your PTCB exam is a most to complete the program. Your recorded may not obtain anything that has to do with substance-abuse, pharmacy related drugs, violations, or misdemeanors. You are also required to submit a fingerprint session.

“Hurry up, Greenie! If the insulin isn’t in the refrigerator now, Mr. Smith will not be a happy camper! Don’t think reconstituting Mrs. Johnson’s prescription lets you slack off; if you’re not doing three things at once, you shouldn’t be back here.” I displace my wrath onto the medicine bottle by shaking it a bit too forcefully for any sane man, add a new customer into the computer system, and manage to distill my feelings towards my new boss’s lack of understanding into a look of hatred. Evading webs of phone lines and fighting off a plethora of unappeased, apprehensive customers, I contemplate whether the twenty cents increase to my hourly pay warrants all the responsibility that accompanies working in a pharmacy.

The medication process would have less steps and less people involves in it. Every step has to have people involved to make sure patients are safe, but if there were less steps there would be less people involved (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2012, p. 386). As long as everyone in the process follows the rules they were taught at the facility and in the programs they completed there would be no errors. The present workflow that we use is ineffective because not all orders get to pharmacy in a timely manner, and in some instances the medication is not put in correctly by the pharmacist. When the orders are not placed correctly, the nurse has to catch the error and correct it by calling pharmacy and re faxing the orders. This creates delays in patient care and

Medication errors are among the most common medical errors, harming and costing millions of patients in the world very year. Prevention of medication errors is, therefore, a high priority worldwide. Nowadays, various information technology (IT) systems are widely used to prevent and reduce medication errors. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) with patient-specific decision support is one of the most powerful IT systems used by physicians to improve patient safety in various healthcare settings. As an example, application of CPOE systems has significantly reduced errors related to dosing of psychoactive medications. Pharmacy dispensing systems, including drug-dispensing

When I was in high school, I had a mentor ask me, “What career would you like to have when you graduate”? Those words still lingering in my head until this day and to be honest I really didn’t know what answer to give him because I was still unsure. He then chose to put it in my mind that Pharmacy Technicians are important and they are needed just about every day. I took it upon myself to do some research. In 2010, I read that in 2009, there were approximately 267,000 pharmacists and, in 2008, 326,300 pharmacy technicians. Between 2003 and 2009, the number of pharmacists in the workforce increased by 35,000.

Pharmacist verifies the order by verifying right patient, medication, dose, frequency, duration and patient's allergy. Once the order is verified it prints a label at the dispensing area where the technician has to dispense it. Two copies of label are printed one which goes on the drug and the other one for the record purpose. Technician puts the label on the bag and grab the correct medication for that particular label. Institution here arranges the medication in the alphabetical order, some of them as fast mover drugs, some kept as according to the dosage forms such as vials, and also the sound-alike/look-alike, high alert in order to minimize the errors which can

The problem that the community is experiencing related to medication administration is that there is no system that can be used to check the medication before administering except the RNs and LPNs themselves. Staff members are using picture of patients in the system as a way to identify patients before administering medications. They do not have barcode reader to alert them when they are about to administer wrong medications. The community is aware of this problem and started to use the same process except that the medication is checked by three nurses instead of two after entering the information into the system.

Counseling patients is extremely important; it allows pharmacists with the opportunity to better understand the health status of their patients. If a patient doesn’t know what, why or how to take their medication. We are the ones who help educate them. Better informed patients equates to better overall healthcare. If they are more medically literate before seeking our help, we can better assist them. As they begin to inquire more, it pushes health care providers to be more conscientious of their tasks. Greater care and consideration is taken when our patients can also hold us accountable. Encouraging patients to reach out with concerns or comments will benefit the pharmacist patient care process. For example, if the patient was able to identify that the drug name, though similar, were blatantly incorrect and brought it to the attention of her pharmacist they could have fixed it before the patient walked out the

As a pharmacy technician we can play a big role in greening environments, sustainability, and Green Teams by increasing awareness of the damage pharmaceutical waste can cause. We can adopt green purchasing strategies, asking suppliers if they have a certification in environmental compliance. Watching the pharmacies energy use, suggesting an energy-saving heating, cooling, water, and lighting system. Knowing the local and national environmental regulations to manage our waste, like never mix pharmaceuticals with other medical waste or sharps, documenting destruction of hazardous waste, and using reverse distribution. Pharmacy technicians can create and insist on implementing a recycling system. We can also communicate with patients on the proper medical disposal and participate in take back programs provided by each state.

In the discharge pharmacy, they receive calls all day long from nurses asking where the medication and when it can be expected to be delivered. The calls from nurses are symptoms of an inefficient system that does not allow medication orders to be tracked. Medication tracking system eliminates the need for replacing lost or late medication and decreases pharmacy and nursing time searching for medication by knowing when the medications left the pharmacy and where it was delivered, it can also help identify the last person to handle of medication to eliminate diversion.

Your responsibilities are not yet complete, because each time a medication is administered, it must be documented. Your documentation of medication administration must be done at the time that you give the medication on the medication log. It should be written in blue or black ink. No pencil or white out should be used, and never cross out, if you make a mistake on the medication log. Just circle your mistake and explain what happened.