Pharmacy Assistants

A Day in the Life

As a pharmacy technician working in a local drugstore, you arrive about half an hour before the pharmacy counter opens for the morning. The pharmacist on duty is there before you, so you say hello and take a quick inventory of bottles, caps and jars as you prepare to start the work day. It's getting close to flu season, so you expect to be busy. After restocking the prescription bags and checking the label printer, it's time to open the window and greet your first customers.

Only one person has been waiting, and she's just picking up a refill on a prescription the pharmacist prepared yesterday. As you're completing her transaction, you hear an incoming fax, the first of many you'll get throughout the day. Doctors' offices and hospitals fax prescriptions to your pharmacy as a convenience for patients, and it's your job to organize them for the pharmacist. In some cases, you may also prepare the prescriptions under the pharmacist's directions.

As you expected, your day is becoming busier near lunchtime. You spend most of your morning on the phone calling in refill requests to doctors' offices, entering new prescriptions into the system and ringing up customers. At one point, the pharmacist directs you to reconstitute an antibiotic suspension while he compounds another medication; it's a common task and one you enjoy. Counting pills and pouring liquid medicines are also part of your daily work, but you've had more paperwork than preparation today.

Before lunch, you wash your hands thoroughly, something you've gotten in the habit of doing regularly because of the number of sick people who interact with you. It's as much for their protection as yours, and so are the gloves you wear while preparing medications. When you return, you have a shipment of medications to receive, record and stock. You're responsible for ensuring that every medication is accounted for and in its proper place. Organization is vital to a pharmacy.

The rest of your afternoon goes by quickly as you count and label prescriptions while your fellow pharmacy aide handles the cash register. The pharmacist relies on you to add the necessary patient precaution labels on bottles, and you have a system that makes the work go smoothly. Double-checking everything is part of your system. You've worked in the pharmacy long enough to know many common medications by sight, but you check with the pharmacist or with a reference guide if you have any questions.

As your shift ends, you give the arriving shift any information they need. Some retail pharmacies and hospital pharmacies are open 24 hours a day, but your location closes when the drugstore shuts its doors for the night. You're headed home on time.