Description:
Pharmacy Technician
Main duties
- Medicines Supply
- Dispense medicines for out-patients, in-patients and discharge prescriptions following guidelines, under the supervision of the Pharmacy Technicians.
- Take payment for prescription charges and generate a receipt when required.
- Ensure that all information needed for accurate stock control and prescription issues data is recorded using both paper systems and the computerised Pharmacy Information System (PIS).
- Liaise with Procurement staff about urgently required medicines and inform patients and other health care staff about supply problem /delays.
- Ward Based
- Print ward lists and handover sheets to identify new patients admitted since the previous pharmacy visit.
- Transfer medicines between wards if patients have been transferred without them. This will include medicines dispensed by the hospital pharmacy as well as patients own drugs (PODs).
Support the ward pharmacists and technicians to record accurate medication histories by:
- Ascertaining if the patient has brought supplies of their medicines from home
- Requesting and recording consent from the patient to access their GP or Summary Care Records, printing the record, or requesting faxes from GPs to handover to the ward technician or pharmacist.
- Ensure patients have enough medicines available to avoid missed doses by:
- Assessing PODs as suitable for use on the hospital according to standard operating procedures.
- Contacting relatives or carers with patient consent, to bring in the patients PODs into hospital if necessary.
- Screening prescription charts to identify missed doses, new items prescribed and any changes to medicines that might require a supply from pharmacy, alerting the pharmacist or technician as appropriate.
- Liaising with ward staff to identify any additional stock medicines that they require.
- Support clinical areas to maintain safe and secure handling of medicines by:
- Ensuring that all medicines for individual patients are stored correctly in the bedside locker, or elsewhere on the ward according to the standards within the Trust Medicines Charter.
- Delivering patient labelled medicines to individual bedside lockers.
- Participate in pharmacy-led audits as required.
- Report any incidents of inappropriate storage and handling of medicines to the pharmacy technician.
- Ensure that information collected is communicated to the relevant pharmacist or technician in a timely manner.
- Minimise medicines waste by managing medicines returns from clinical areas according to standard operating procedures.
- Technical Services
- Preparation of non-sterile medicinal products for specific patients e.g. suspensions, creams, ointments, powders etc.
- Preparation of sterile medicinal products for specific patients in a laminar flow cabinet/isolator in a controlled clean room environment e.g. parenteral nutrition and chemotherapy treatments.
- Preparation of worksheets, accurate assembly of raw materials, dosage calculations, accurate measurements using balances, graduated measures, and syringes. These operations require a high degree of manual dexterity, and competencies will be continually assessed.
- Assist with the re-packaging of medicines according to standard operating procedures.