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Friday, September 4, 2009

When Will Teachers Learn?

My least favorite class is Pharmacy Lab. My favorite class is also Pharmacy Lab.

The best part of school is going into lab and learning how to do things we'll actually be doing when we're honest-to-goodness pharmacists, and that's pretty cool. I particularly like the labs that teach me something new that I've never experienced before, like IV bags. Coming from retail, I didn't have a clue how to mix IV bags until we had that lesson in lab. That was a fun day.

However, when we do important, yet boring retail shit like filling prescriptions in lab for a "refresher" is when I want to just excuse myself from class. The worst is when they teach us to do things incorrectly, or tell us information that just doesn't happen in the real world. They showed us how to fill amoxicillin 250/5 for a non-existent pediatric. The directions were 1TSP PO BID 10D (for acute otitis media). My teacher told us that the doctor should include what the drug is being used for specifically on the prescription. I actually laughed out loud. Doctors write what the drug is for on maybe, maybe, 2% of prescriptions, and my teacher refused to believe that. I wanted to ask her exactly where she obtained the knowledge that doctors write what's wrong with their patients on every script, but I'm sure that would just have embarrassed her more than she already was. Turns out I can be a nice person occasionally. Weird.

She also didn't understand insurance. My friend screwed up the days supply on one of his scripts and I jokingly said "Don't forget to reverse that through insurance, we don't want to get audited." She asked me what I meant. I found it unsettling that the person who was supposed to be teaching us how to work in retail didn't have a clue what the legal ramifications would be if a pharmacist sent the wrong days supply to insurance companies. I believe it's called fraud. She understood that the days supply needed to be correct, but didn't understand that had my friend actually sent that to insurance, he would've had to delete the script, reverse the claim, and re-bill it with the correct days supply. I did my best to explain it, but it was really really hard to do it without making fun of her, so I felt it best to just give up on it. Once again, I took the high road. It made me feel uncomfortable to be so nice, so I kicked the nearest helpless animal I saw when I left lab. It was a squirrel; I offered the little guy an acorn then punted his ass across the lawn. My day was better after that.*

One more thing I hate about Pharm Lab: Our work stations are desks. We have desks where we sit down, enter the scripts, and then count them out. Sitting down. We have to wear dress pants, dress shirt, dress shoes, and a tie to look professional and yet they let us sit down. Nay, practically force us to sit down. I just can't do it. I've worked in retail way too long to be able to sit down and comfortably count by fives. It just doesn't feel right, the counting tray is too high when I'm sitting down, so I end up on my feet hunched over a Protonix tray, not minding the uncomfortable feeling in my upper back because I'm used to it. I welcome the familiar feeling, even though it's much more extreme at lab than when I'm at work. I bet there's a two foot difference, but that feeling is still more comfortable than sitting down. Strange, huh? I'm going to make for a nice little Nazi for some corpo-pharmacy chain someday.

*Relax, the whole squirrel kicking thing didn't happen.

1 comment:

  1. They really make you fucking sit down to count? Even the cracked out Oxy seekers know we don't sit down for anything

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