Continuing on from last week, this time we will covering part time work experiences from students working in hospital and community pharmacies. Community- Chemist Warehouse - 2nd year pharmacy student Chemist Warehouse is a very large community pharmacy chain in Australia. So, in a company so large, I thought that the service provided might be more impersonal than a private pharmacy. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can’t speak for every store, but at my pharmacy it’s commonplace to know all of the regular customers by name. Our priority is putting the health and wellbeing of the customer first, and this is prioritised over selling them products that they might not need. All of the staff, including the pharmacy assistants, are trained in co-therapy. This means that the pharmacist can direct patients to the pharmacy assistants, where any additional products needed to combat side effects (or to supplement their therapy) can be recommended. Working as a student has helped me in so many ways. Working also allows me to see real life cases and scenarios, and to be involved in problem-solving when our pharmacy receives an atypical script or patient. Working has also helped me to develop my counselling skills, as well as my dispensing and drug knowledge. I mentioned earlier that our staff is all trained in co-therapy and S2 products; at university, I can apply my knowledge of these products in the non-pharmacological section of my counselling. So, my university studies help me at work, and my knowledge from work helps me at university. For any student looking to advance their knowledge and practical skills, I would recommend starting a job at a community pharmacy. The training and effort that they put into their pharmacy students has really benefited me and I've found it really valuable. I hope this helps shed a little light onto what working in a community pharmacy is like. Hospital- Slade Pharmacy Epworth Hospital- 2nd year pharmacy student
I’m currently a second year pharmacy student doing Monash’s Bpharm/ Mpharm course. I’ve been working in a small private community pharmacy for a few years and I have just started working at Slade Pharmacy located at the Epworth Freemasons hospital so I’ve experienced what it is like working in both community and hospital pharmacy. Slade provides both community and hospital pharmacy services so it was a really interesting position to be in as it meant that I could gain experience in both areas without limiting myself to only one scope of practice. However, the majority of the workload was the hospital - around 80%. Slade also provides compounding services including sterile compounding such as eye drops and IVF however that is based at another site so any compounding requests are sent there. Compounded medications can either be collected at the compounding site or at the store where the patient dropped off the request. The day to day activities at Slade differed a lot compared to community pharmacy. As a pharmacy student, my main role was in the dispensary where it mainly involved dispensing discharges and inpatient medication orders. Inpatient medication orders are essentially the individual patient’s charts and these are sent down by the nurse where there is no stock on the wards but the patient would require it. These inpatient medications are all delivered to the wards at a set time by either me, a pharmacy student or another technician. There would also be the occasional ad hoc imprest request. Imprest is the ward’s standard medication store which can be freely used for any patient if required. The stock levels of the imprests are usually maintained by our imprest technician however the ward may require a particular medication urgently and would sent down a request. This imprest request is called ‘ad hoc’ as it is done when necessary or when required. In the morning, there would be the busy rush of trying to process all the discharges as well as inpatient medication orders and occasional ad hoc imprest requests. This job would require a lot of time management skills as you would need to know what to prioritise. Generally, discharges would take priority as the inpatient medication orders can be processed and sent up to the wards on the delivery rounds at a later time however, at times, some inpatient orders can be urgent particularly if the nurses themselves come down to the pharmacy to pick the medication up. On top of all the dispensing, there would be lots of phone calls from nurses and outpatients (patients who are serviced through the retail or community pharmacy side). In addition to my role of dispensing, I would also counsel patients on their discharge medicines and their discharge medicine list if they had one. Epworth Freemasons mainly provides maternity, surgical procedures and day procedures as well as IVF so the medications I mainly encounter are based off those. Following the morning rush of discharges, I would continue to process more in patient medication orders throughout the day, and maintain the pharmacy’s stock levels by ordering as we needed to, to ensure that we would have enough stock for the next day. There would be the occasional retail or an outpatient/ community pharmacy script during the day however the bulk for the work laid with the hospital. One big difference from hospital and community pharmacy is the type of interactions. As a pharmacy student, in community, the main interaction is done through the patient with the occasional call to the doctor whereas in hospital pharmacy, the nurses comprised of the majority of the interactions. Patient and doctor interactions are mainly done through the pharmacist in the hospital. Because I would talk to the nurses so often, this meant having to maintain a good relationship with the nurses especially considering the fast paced and time contrained environment and being considerate and respectful of each other. Another difference between community and hospital pharmacy is the type of scripts dealt with. Hospitals use their charts as their ‘scripts’ as it is an order form the doctors whereas community pharmacy would have the script pads. Slade Pharmacy at Epworth Freemasons hospital uses paperless claiming hence rather than dealing with physical scripts, orders and charts are sent through the fax machine whereas in community pharmacy, physical scripts are mainly used. However, the charts do not contain authority numbers like the regular community pharmacy script would hence if the patient is on a high cost drug which would require an authority script with special approval for it to be subsidised, The pharmacy staff would have to alert the doctors so they can provide a physical script with an authority number so we can claim it through Medicare properly. One thing to keep in mind is that my current duties are those of a technician or a pharmacy student. What a pharmacist does in my hospital is also quite different where for a clinical pharmacist, it would involve more of going to the wards and talking to the doctors and patients as well as negotiations with suppliers and government departments regarding the supply of certain medications. And of course there are different types of pharmacists in hospital such as clinical trials. Slade Pharmacy at my site has clinical and dispensing pharmacists. Overall, whilst the fundamentals of pharmacy practice is the same regardless of the location, the services and the daily activities differed drastically across the community and hospital pharmacy sites I am working at. Both had its merits and downsides and preference for hospital for community would come down to the individual’s taste. I would highly encourage trying to gain as much exposure as possible whether it be through a part time job or a placement before deciding on a pathway.
2 Comments
1/18/2019 07:27:31 am
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2/1/2021 06:30:11 am
We are a full service compounding pharmacy located in Costa Mesa, California, a coastal city in Orange County. Our specialty is personalized medications to help our patients achieve optimal health.
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