Cory's Blog

So I was ready for this, I mean I had a WHOLE YEAR of pharmacy school under my belt. I had taken my community pharmacy lab, and I was excited for this first rotation in a community pharmacy. Piece of cake right? Not so fast! All the preparation in the classroom doesn’t compare to the good ol’ fashioned real world experience.

Allow me to fill you in a little bit more about what I am talking about. In pharmacy school, during the summer after your first year, you get out of the classroom and do some real life hands on work in what is a called a community rotation. The basic idea is that you go out into a retail pharmacy setting (your run of the mill CVS or Walgreens etc.) and get your feet wet taking care of various tasks from filling prescriptions to transcribing them from doctors offices and, the most important part in my opinion: patient counseling.

For me, I wanted to do my rotation close to home, and so I arranged it so that I am working at a Target pharmacy about five minutes from my house. I did this because I don’t have a lot of pharmacy experience, and I wanted to be as comfortable as possible to be able to learn as much as I could in my four-week rotation. Had I stayed in South Carolina, I would have signed up for a section (early mid or late summer) and location preference online and been assigned a pharmacy to work at.

However, as I said, I was coming back to Tucson to work, and last Tuesday I began my rotation at Target. Initially, my pharmacist preceptor, Elena, and I just sat down and went over the objectives of the rotation. She also asked me if there was anything specific I wanted to do. Since I don’t have a lot of work experience as a basis to know what I do and don’t want to do, I just said I wanted to learn as much as possible. So far, it has gone very well in the first week. I have done an in depth drug report, taken prescriptions via telephone (which is not as easy as one might think), and gone over our “Top 200” drug list.

All of that may not seem like much, but trust me, there is a lot more to this pharmacy thing than you think and if all of that seems kind of “dry” to you all, there was a pretty hands on exciting activity I did last week: patient counseling. Now I had done counseling in a controlled setting in our community lab last fall, informing our instructors on important information when taking medications, but it was a whole different story when an actual patient was depending on me for information that affected their health. I probably counseling four or five patients over the course of the week, and also watched in on several more to learn the finer points of teaching patients how they want to take their meds.

From what Elena told me, I did a pretty good job of counseling, but I still have a ways to go before I am a pro. However, I have still had a blast working with Elena and all of the different pharmacists and technicians this past week, and look forward to my next three. Like I mentioned before, all of that book learning cannot compare to the “real thing.” Take care!