You really don't need a 3.3 to function as a pharmacist. Now I call up the pharmacists with a question and I get a 30 sec pause while I hear the keyboard typing away. Even then, they are unsure of their answers. I have had times when the pharmacists told me to hold on so he can ask the other pharmacists b/c he could not find it in his database. I could and now forgo calling the pharmacists completely. I just do my own google search for dosing, drug interactions.
Pharmacists, like you, can quickly rattle off the answers for the things they see everyday in their practice. But, you aren't calling the pharmacist for everyday things, are you? You are calling because you have some extremely unusual case. The pharmacist isn't just rattling off an answer from google, you wouldn't be calling them if you could find the answer on google, would you? What the pharmacist is doing is looking up and/or figuring out the different variables, and then making a judgment call on the relative risk and or dosing--and yes, they may indeed ask their colleagues for their opinion.
I do not know what has happened to the profession but the internet has made you unsure of their field. Most lack the knowledge and confidence to give me a straight answer without doing a database search.
What has happened is the field of pharmacy has gotten much more complex. Just like "general practitioners" no longer do everything. Medicine has an ever increasing amount of specialists due to the complexity of all the new knowledge & treatments available. While pharmacy is also starting to specialize now, asking an unusual & complex question of a "general practitioner" pharmacist, means they aren't going to be able to rattle off an answer, but they probably will be able to figure out an answer (just like a general practitioner could often figure out problems in the old days after they did a little research.) I assume you are a specialist, so things are different for you, but its not unheard of for family doctors/internists today to take the time to look something up before giving a diagnosis/treatment recommendation...being a generalist is hard, and in todays litigation climate, it only makes sense to "double-check" even when one is sure of the answer.
When I get questions from other specialists or patients, I answer it. I don't tell them to hold on while I type for the answer. I am sure they could do the same and cut me out as the middle man.
Always? 100% of the time? Because I have had doctors leave the room (presumably to look something up) before they come back to give me the diagnosis and treatment. Certainly anytime a doctor refers to a specialist or says they need to call a specialist, they are saying they don't know off the top of their head. Unsurprisingly NP's/PA's don't even bother to leave the room, they will look up their protoguide right in front of me.
Pharmacists are 99% task/check and balance, managers of the place and has very little to do with patient care. Your decisions are black and white 99.9% of the time in Retail. Medicine is rarely black and white as everyone manages the same problem somewhat differently.
Actually the biggest part of our job is catching errors made from doctors who are prescribing outside of their specialty, doctors who don't normally prescribe for children who are trying to dose something for a pediatric patient, catching interactions/duplications because the patient doesn't tell you what other doctors they are seeing or what medicines those doctors have given them or what OTC herbals they are taking, making judgment calls on the computerized allergies/interaction because 90% of them are bogus (which if you got someone untrained doing the pharmacists job, either the doctor would be called on every single prescription, because pretty much every prescription has some clinically insignificant interaction/allergy alert or the doctor would never get called, even when they should because the untrained person would never call.)
But for a pharmacist, when I bring in a script for a zpak. EVERY pharmacist will do the same. Take big put in small, take label, put it on. Check allergies/interactions (computerized).
Well, perhaps every *good* pharmacist will do the same, just like every *good* doctor would be doing the same thing during an office visit. (see paragraph above for what the good pharmacist is actually doing--and of course, just like there are bad doctors, they will always be some bad pharmacists who don't do their job or do it well) Isn't that a good thing? Don't you want to always get good service? Why do you think there should be a huge variability in what a pharmacist does? I expect EVERY doctor to do the same thing when I go in for a office visit....this is a good thing.
Plus, the difference is docs have direct patient care where a mistake has dire consequences. Retail is very little patient care.
Wrong, a mistake in pharmacy can also have dire consequences. And many dispensing errors are caught by talking to the patient.
I have been in a hospital based practice for 15 yrs, been to countless med exec meetings. I am not the only that have very little respect for the field of pharmacy esp retail.
Whether or not others respect a field has nothing to do with the level of service & professionalism of that field provides. I can thing of many jobs that don't have the respect they deserve--usually because people don't respect what they don't understand, which seems to be the case with you.
Watch, there soon (if not yet) be online Pharmacy degrees from the likes of Phoenix. And Walgreens will hire them just as fast b/c they know the difference from a Phoenix vs prestigious school is razor thin when it comes to retail.
Wrong, yes chains want cheap pharmacists, but they also don't want the liability of pharmacists who can not do their job, or who can not do their job quickly. It is already possible to get on-line pharmacy degrees, but these students still must do rotations (which is the big issue with most on-line schools, they can't secure approved rotation sites for students.)
edited to fix my horrible quoting job
