How important is the pharmacy technician to the pharmacy team?

Answer 1

The pharmacy technician is vital to the pharmacy team. In a retail setting, the technician will triage phone calls, handling the calls for refill requests or drug pricings, and direct the questions that need to be answered by a pharmacist to the one who is available. They count prescriptions and prepare all the medications for the patients (the pharmacist does check over the medications before they leave the pharmacy). They also wait on customers who are both dropping off prescriptions and picking up prescriptions.

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Pharmacy technician's role in retail setting: order entry, filling prescriptions, managing refill requests, billing insurance companies, resolving insurance disputes, inventory management, managing drive-thru windows, prescription pick up, resolving minor customer complaints and addressing pharmacist when needed.

Pharmacy technicians are the lifeblood of the pharmacy. A pharmacist is only as good as the technicians that surround them, mainly because a technician that is efficient makes the pharmacist more productive and very thorough because it allows them to devote more time to verifying prescriptions and screening for possible adverse drug events. Pharmacists love technicians and customers usually will judge a pharmacy's competence by the actions of the technician. Case in point, CPhT's rock!

In other places though, there aren't that much need for pharmacy technician as the pharmacy only covers a few people in their places so they only have about one pharmacy technician (mostly places away from the city), but I still haven't seen any pharmacy that has NO pharmacy technician at all.