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 JOHN
ALDOUS
Hospital Pharmacy Perspective
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The
Pharmacist/Pharmacy Assistant Relationship
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Another
new year is upon us and we look forward to what the future holds
for Pharmacy as a profession.
The relationship between pharmacist and assistant is one which
has evolved over the years and is about to be changed again.
The NSW Health Department has led the way by recognising that
pharmacy technicians are a distinct group from pharmacy assistants
with their own responsibilites and tasks, with a corresponding
increase in pay rates.
This distinction will need to be more closely mirrored in community
pharmacy, or the expanding role of the hospital pharmacy technician
could prove more attractice to technicians currently working in
the retail setting.
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Roles
currently being filled by pharmacy technicians include sterile
and cytotoxic dispensing, which is one area in which the pharmacist
shortage is most noticeable.
Clinical support roles for technicians are currently under development,
and already exist in many hospitals.
Technicians can perform a large part of the information gathering
necessary for clinical pharmacy support.
These tasks expand greatly the traditional 'dispensary technician'
role and may prove attractive to many community pharmacy technicians,
particularly if wages for these roles reflect the more complex
nature of the tasks.
Currently to be recognised as a technician, a pharmacy assistant
must complete a Certificate III or higher qualification, recognising
their skills.
At the moment, there is a Diploma level course available that
meets this standard, so technicians have the ability to move
into this new classification quite soon.
Despite this move in Australia, we are still playing catch-up
to the British, who are much further down the technician pathway
in Pharmacy.
Moves are afoot to establish a register of pharmacy technicians,
and develop a code of conduct for pharmacy technicians that
would reflect this increasingly professional role.
At the moment there are over 15000 fully qualified technicians
in the UK, of whom more than a third work in hospital environments,
and just over half work in retail settings.
This ratio appears more heavily weighted towards the hospital
setting than what we are seeing in Australia.
Could this be an indicator of where the future lies for pharmacy
technicians?
So the challenge is to find roles for technicians to fill in
community pharmacies which will prove as varied and attractive
as those in other settings.
An idea put forward in this column last year was to provide
specialised training to staff to deal solely in OTC products
and reduce the supervisory stress of the pharmacist.
A small clinical support role exists for extracting records
from the dispensary computers for DMMR patients, and in this
area the role could be expanded to handle some of the correspondence
and logistical work for pharmacies with large numbers of DMMR
patients.
Once this program becomes more widely accepted and an everyday
part of pharmacy practice, pharmacists will need this kind of
support, to enable them to complete reviews more efficiently
(especially if the rate of payment for the service doesn't increase!).
Colleagues
have suggested that the role of pharmacy technician may develop
to the point where it becomes a possible stepping stone into
a career as a pharmacist.
I'm not sure if it will develop in that way, because of the
different focus of the two roles, technical versus clinical.
I can see the roles of clinical pharmacist and technician evolving
into separate distinct entities, each with their own responsibilities
and regulation (as we are seeing in the UK), with greater focus
on the clinical and technical side respectively.
Other
articles by This Writer
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