What Are Pharmacy Technician Duties?
When you enter your local pharmacy’s office chances are the person who greets you and enters in your prescription is a pharmacy technician. Pharmacy Technician duties involve helping the pharmacist with the routine task involved in filling prescriptions. Some level of training will have to be endured whether it is on the job pharmacy technician training, or a formal education. This education is needed to understand prescriptions, checking for accuracy and completeness, and selecting the right medicines to fill the prescriptions while adhering to all the correct formalities. To fulfil a pharmacy technician’s duties you must have enough knowledge to be able to check that the prescription makes sense before it’s ever shown to the pharmacist for it’s final inspection.
Some Typical Pharmacy Technician Duties Include
- Dispensing Medicines
- Receiving prescriptions
- Checking the prescription for completeness
- Retrieving the medication as determined by the prescription
- Counting, weighing, measuring prescriptions
- Preparing prescription labels
- Selecting suitable containers and labeling
In some cases the pharmacy technician duties will also include those duties normally taken on by a pharmacy aid such as stocking prescriptions and over the counter drugs on the pharmacy shelves, handling patient accounts, answering phones and handling money.
Please note pharmacy technician duties are not to be taken lightly they don’t merely fill capsule bottles. Technicians in some cases are even given the important task of mixing medications. In these cases if there are any doubts or questions they must refer to the lead pharmacist on duty. This also means they must know when and how to ask the right questions to insure quality.
Basically pharmacy technicians handle a variety of tasks within a pharmacy. Their duties don’t only include the simple aspects of a pharmacy but they also deal with more complex procedures. They are continuously multi-tasking and dealing with consumers, all while meeting high quality standards and dispensing medicine accurately.
