How Does a Pharmacy Tech Spend a Workday?

How to Prepare

Pharmacy technicians work in a pharmacy and assist pharmacists with their daily job duties. Though you can work as a pharmacy tech with no previous experience, becoming a pharmacy tech requires some serious study.

Many people who are considering a career as a pharmacy tech take a course of study at their local technical college or university. Courses can usually be finished within a year, and you can even choose to take a course online. Once you pass your course, you must take a national exam to become a certified pharmacy tech.

Workday

Pharmacy techs can choose to work in either a retail or hospital environment. When working in a retail setting a pharmacy tech begins by taking a patient's prescription and finding out information about their health insurance. They then put this information into the computer to make a label for the drugs, which indicates dosage information and price.

The pharmacy tech then finds the medication on the shelf and counts out the number of pills to bottle for the patient. Once the counting is done and the pills are bottled, a pharmacy tech may then refer the patient to the pharmacist on duty if there is any counseling to be done about the medication. Pharmacy techs cannot, by law, counsel patients about their drugs. The last step in the transaction is then checking out the patient at the check out counter.

Hospital Work

The workday of a pharmacy tech who works at a hospital is a somewhat different than one who works at a retail store. Hospital pharmacy techs rarely deal with patients directly. They wait for doctor's orders to come in, and then they prepare the drugs for use in the hospital. This may require dispensing pills or even getting an IV bag ready for a patient to use. In some cases, prescriptions are prepared for a patient who is getting ready to go home.

Resources

• Allied Health Schools