Video:Day of a Pharmacist

Transcript:Day of a Pharmacist

Hi, I'm Bill Brownstein. Pharmacist and owner of Kids RX in New York, New York, here for About.com.I'm going to show you what it's like to be a pharmacist. A typical day in a pharmacy. Like ours here, would be, we come in here in the morning, we get our computers on, we make sure that everything has been ordered from the night before. The things that need to be filled for that day. And the day begins where the phone will start ringing and we're taking doctor phone calls and we're getting refill requests from patients. We're checking e-mails. People e-mail requests for refills into us.

Regular Responsibilities in the Day of a Pharmacist

The responsibilities of a pharmacist: checking a doctor's prescription for accuracy and for correct dosage. We maintain patient profiles to make sure that nothing they're taking interacts with anything else they take. I need to catch everything that we're doing in terms of filling the prescriptions. That's why it's important for patients to maintain all of the prescriptions at one pharmacy, because we are essentially the last spot that we can catch a mistake or a drug interaction for a patient. So, it gets a little difficult when people use many different doctors and many different pharmacies. We're responsible for counseling the patient on the side effects of the medication and counseling them on dosage. How to take the medication and what things to watch out for while taking the medication.

Talk To Insurance Companies During the Day of a Pharmacist

And then a lot of the day is spent talking to insurance companies when claims don't go through and filling prescriptions, which entails grabbing pills from a bottle and putting them from a big bottle into a little bottle. And in a lot of cases, at my store here, we do a lot of compounding. So, it's a lot of mixing medications from their pure powders and changing the dosage forms of some of those tablets and powders that we have.Our day is from 8:30 to 7. Unlike most professions, there's no real lunch hour in pharmacy, there's no real breaks. In fact the law states that when the pharmacist either goes to the restroom or leaves the store, the door must be locked. So, there always has to be a licensed pharmacist on duty. Some days are longer for some pharmacies, depending on the hours. So the day is long.Thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the web at About.com.