My Journey as a Pharmacist (약사로서 나의 여정) 2

It’s at seven-thirty sharp in the morning when I awoke. I presumed that I wasn’t as nervous as what I had felt for yesterday. Thank God for that.

(Andy can’t sleep usually when he’s encountered something that’s completely new for him, the first GCE examination couple of months ago, for instance, had caused him a terrible nervous strain: his hands were trembling with fear when doing his first GCE Biology test paper was a piece of evidence.)

I have to be on duty at 9 and off duty at 3 every weekday to learn about how’s a life a pharmacist should lead. In the meantime, doing some independent research’s also important for the sake of my own achievement in the long term in addition to giving some points to be included into my personal statement.

I guess I would never know that’s quite a range of careers in pharmacy if I didn’t get into Wiki this morning. What is a pharmacist? (Definitely known) How about a pharmacy assistant or a pharmacy technician? Oh no, I supposed there’s still many things for me to learn.

Pharmacy technicians are pharmacy staff members who work under the direct supervision of a licensed pharmacist, and perform many pharmacy-related functions: giving medication and other health care products to patients, for instance. Pharmacy technicians also prepare or compound prescribed medication in addition to providing drugs to patients with all the medications checked by a licensed pharmacist. What’s a pharmacist’s role again?

There would probably be a shift of responsibility of a pharmacist to consulting and advising patients if the role of the technician is to increase in the next few years.

Communicative skills are very important, regardless of how well you can speak one or more languages. Pharmacy’s a medical profession demanding effective communicative skills, e.g. how communicable your information or knowledge on a specific drug is. So, the fact that the English requirement for a student to meet in order to get into King’s for pharmacy is higher than that for the other two didn’t really astonish me much.

I should say manual skill and dexterity are required also in pharmacy besides being needed for someone who aches so much to become a doctor or a dentist. A pharmacist needs to handle the drugs during drug-dispensing as well as how a doctor handles his patient during an operation.
Even counting circular tablets with a tablet-counting dispensing triangle (too long a name, I spent hours to find this real name) and using a spatula need both your hands to be skillful.

I was truly in delight when the friendly pharmacy technicians (a job title for those helping a pharmacist) invited me to learn preparing, classifying, dispensing and repackaging medicine with them. Till this moment, I had already mastered the technique of counting tablets by using two equipments. I really envy my partners that they could really dispense tablets with practiced ease. I guess ‘Practice makes perfect’ is rather suitable in this context.

What’s a blister pack? This question needs to come into my mind before I could understand what is meant by ‘deblistering’. A blister pack or package is an innovative containment system made up of three layers [http://www.cncmagazine.com/vol6thru8/v7i25/v7i25g-MrDeb.htm]: a layer of paper that is printed with an information or warning label, a layer of foil that seals in the medication and a layer of plastic bubbles (called blisters) that hold the pills or capsules. Deblistering is therefore referred to a system of product recovery that involves punching holes in the blister packages to retrieve the tablets for repackaging purpose.

Gaining working experience in a pharmacy solely is not enough for me, I reckon that expending more effort and time on research in regard to this is another principal thing I need to do in this break.