Retail Pharmacy Intern

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lixx0843

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  1. Pharmacy Student
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Frankly, I have no retail pharmacy experience. Can anyone tell me what you need to do as a retail pharmacy intern? Thanks.
 
Frankly, I have no retail pharmacy experience. Can anyone tell me what you need to do as a retail pharmacy intern? Thanks.

I have no experience either, but from what I hear,
  • You counsel patients on their medications when the pharmacist is busy
  • You answer any questions that patients/customers may have when they call. Sometimes if the pharmacist is a female and the intern is a male, the male patient will have no questions for the pharmacist, but a million questions for the male intern.
  • Dispense medications like the pharm techs
  • Anything else that the pharmacist or the pharmacy manager assigns for you to do.
 
At our store there's really no difference between techs and interns, besides the fact that I sometimes counsel on OTCs as an intern and the pharmacist lets me (but not the techs) take phoned-in Rxs.
 
Seems very strange to me that someone would consider a career without an inkling of what it is about. When it was suggested that I became a pharmacist, I also had no notion. I went straight to the local chain (Boots) and asked what I could do. They referred me to the Area Manager who suggested I worked as a Saturday boy at the local branch. That was in 1950, and I worked part time and vacations all through college and that is where I did my intern. No real problem. Do you have Saturday/evening etc people in the US, or does everyone work full six days a week?
johnep
 
You do everything. Everything the techs do, everything the pharmacists do except verification.

You do the crap the pharmacist doesn't want/have time for, such as calling for copies, taking voicemail rx's and sometimes counseling patients. Only thing that sucks about being a 1st year is you don't know **** about the medications so you can't really counsel.
 
You do everything. Everything the techs do, everything the pharmacists do except verification.

You do the crap the pharmacist doesn't want/have time for, such as calling for copies, taking voicemail rx's and sometimes counseling patients. Only thing that sucks about being a 1st year is you don't know **** about the medications so you can't really counsel.

Actually, in NYS the pharmacy intern can verify medications, but most pharmacists are just too scared to let us do it.
 
Seems very strange to me that someone would consider a career without an inkling of what it is about. When it was suggested that I became a pharmacist, I also had no notion. I went straight to the local chain (Boots) and asked what I could do. They referred me to the Area Manager who suggested I worked as a Saturday boy at the local branch. That was in 1950, and I worked part time and vacations all through college and that is where I did my intern. No real problem. Do you have Saturday/evening etc people in the US, or does everyone work full six days a week?
johnep

1950!!! 😱
 
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