You will find many career opportunities as a Pharmacy Technician:
Here are just a few of the opportunities and practice settings available to Pharmacy Technicians. No matter who you are, you can find the perfect practice setting for your individual tastes and preferences.
- Chain Retail Pharmacies – You can work in a large retail facility with stores all across the country. These technicians have a lot of patient interaction and work very closely with pharmacists and doctor’s offices. These pharmacies will keep you busy filling prescriptions, obtaining refills for your patients and maintaining your patients’ medication histories and profiles. The benefit packages are usually very generous with paid vacations, opportunities for overtime and health insurance.
- Independent Retail Pharmacy – These are small, independently owned pharmacies. If you like patient interaction, this may be the practice setting for you. Chances are, you will not be as busy as you would in a chain, retail setting, which gives you the opportunity to get to know your patients on a first name basis! You may also have the opportunity for such specialties as compounding or packaging for home health care facilities.
- Out-Patient Hospital Pharmacy – This setting is similar to a retail pharmacy setting because the technicians have a lot of direct patient interaction and spend a lot of time filling prescriptions. These technicians fill prescriptions for patients that are going home from the hospital. Often, they will fill prescriptions for the employees of the hospital, as well. Because these technicians work within a hospital, there are often opportunities to become cross-trained in the In-Patient Pharmacy, within the hospital.
- Hospital Pharmacy – You may want to work in a hospital pharmacy. You will not have much patient interaction, rather, your contact will be primarily with pharmacists, doctors and nurses. There are typically many technician positions within a hospital and technicians are generally cross-trained in most of these positions. In smaller hospitals, these tasks may all be performed by a handful of technicians and in larger facilities each position may be the responsibility of one or two technicians.
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