Pharmacy Technician
A pharmacy technician is a healthcare professional who works under a licensed pharmacist to provide prescription medication to clients. Pharmacy technicians work in a variety of locations, and are sought-after professionals in pharmacies located in hospitals, drug stores, doctors' offices. grocery stores and other general merchandise stores. Can also work for long-term care facilities, pharmaceutical manufacturers, third-party insurance companies, computer software companies, or in government or teaching. Job duties include dispensing prescription drugs and other medical devices to patients and instructing on their use. They may also perform administrative duties in pharmaceutical practice, such as reviewing prescription requests with doctor's offices and insurance companies to ensure correct medications are provided and payment is received.
As a Pharmacy Technician, you may perform some or all of the following tasks:
- Receive prescription requests from patients and doctors' offices
- Accurately measure medication amounts
- Package and label prescriptions
- Establish and maintain patient records
- Accept payment for prescriptions and process insurance claims
- Manage inventory
- Measure prescription amounts for pharmacists
- Label/package prescriptions
- Do organization of inventory and tell pharmacists when there are shortages of supplies
- Enter patient information into database
- Answer telephone calls from customers and healthcare professionals
Job demand for pharmacy technicians is expected to go up by 9% by 2024, which is faster than average. There are a number of reasons that the demand in the pharmacy field is rising.
People are getting older, and Americans are living longer. As this happens, people want to live active lives as they did when they were younger. But of course, they have a higher rate of medical conditions and diseases. So this drives demand for more prescription drugs.
On a related note, there have been many advances in the pharmaceutical field in the last decade. More and more medical conditions and diseases can be improved, cured or controlled with various drugs. This also leads to higher demand for prescription drugs.
Further, pharmacy technicians are relied upon more in pharmacies because pharmacists must tend to other roles, such as providing flu shots and providing advice to patients. It is more cost effective for pharmacies to hire pharmacy techs to do many of these administrative and customer service tasks.