My Community IPPE Experience

When I first started my community IPPE experience, I expected to have a lot of patient interaction. However, I spent very little time doing things such as pulling prescriptions and answering questions. I am grateful for this because it allowed me to really focus on the tasks that I was assigned. In addition, because I was an extra worker for them, I found that everyone had a lot more time than usual to get work done and stop to explain things to me or answer questions. I had a lot of interactions with the pharmacist and technicians while at Walgreens. I was constantly going back and forth between different employees as they were working on different things and very eager to show me what they were doing and to let me try. I learned about
While the main task is to dispense medications, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes that I had never thought about. There are so many resources and work that goes into managing a patient’s entire medication list that rarely gets thought of. I admire the memory that many of the workers have. While I am sure it would come with time, it amazed me how many of the techs and pharmacists knew all the patients by name and could answer a lot of questions about them without having to ask the patient. It seemed they knew just about everyone’s life story. This is one area that I need to improve on. While working in a community pharmacy, I find that I focus most of my attention on the drugs themselves. I am always very particular in what I pull from the shelves and what I am counting. While this is all very important, I need to realize that there is more to filling prescriptions than just counting pills. I found myself so focused on what the medication was that often I did not even look at the patient’s name that was on the label. This is something that I took away from my IPPE rotation that I am trying to implement in my current job in a community pharmacy. I have become a lot more familiar with the names, but now I realize that the next step is associating the names with faces and remembering the people who come in and circle back an hour
I made numerous phone calls for refill requests, insurance issues, and drug therapy changes. These phone calls really helped me to understand our scope of practice as well as the legal regulations that we must follow. It was interesting to see what changes to prescriptions could be made over the phone and who could authorize them. I also thought it was interesting to compare how different changes were documented by the pharmacy While it was important to see how everything worked on the pharmacy’s end, I also gained a better understanding of how it works from the doctor’s end as well. I spoke with a large variety of professionals, some friendly and some not. Over time, I came to understand the dos and don’ts much better. The phrase “kill them with kindness” seemed to take on a whole new meaning particularly when calling to clarify mistakes on the prescriptions. There was one instance where the staff member I was speaking to was who was horrified by what was written on the prescription. She transferred me to three different people all of whom claimed I was misreading the script before I was finally connected to the manager who clarified their policy and gave me the correction I