Friday, April 11, 2008
i had the best day today =) as part of my fieldwork, i spent a few hours at a pharmacy. It's the second part of my fieldwork coz i already did a couple of hours last week but i didn't learn very much last week coz the pharmacy was so busy. Today however, i probably learnt more about pharmacy in the couple of hours i was there than i had in 6 weeks of lectures. The head pharmacist kindly devoted part of his precious time into being my personal teacher =) it just so happens that he's about to start teaching in the pharmacy faculty for 2nd years and above so he'll probably be my tutor next year or something which i'm really excited about because he's such a great teacher =) I dispensed my first few scripts today :D he figured that instead of telling me about the dispensing process i'd probably learn a lot more if i actually did some dispensing myself. He'd give me a script and i'd have to type up all these details on the database and then double check and triple check if the details are all accurate and matching and then he'd give me this really FAT medication handbook and get me to look up the medication and ask me what it treats, what it does and what is that particular disease state. It's so scary how they're like literally hundreds of drugs...and the pharmacist knew off the top of his head...the brand name, the drug name(which is like..all really long and complicated eg. esomeprazol)..the different strengths of the drug and what it treats...i have no idea how i'm going to learn it all. I dispensed a drug which i found out was a really strong medication to treat nausea caused by chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The pharmacist told me that it was quite a rare drug to dispense and when you do dispense it you know the patient you're dealing with is very sick ie. they're cancer patients which is sad but it's always nice when you look at the medical history and see the strength of the drug decreasing indicating they're getting better =) I didn't get to counsel patients obviously...but it was really interesting just observing the way pharmacists talk to patients...just the friendliness, patience you have to have..and the ability to just make conversation to put the patient at ease. I even learnt about dodgy scripts they come across and the druggies they have to deal with. It's amazing how sharp you have to be to pick up any signs of fraud. ah well...end of a great day...it's back to pen on paper this weekend unfortunately =(
posted @ 7:20 AM
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