Considering looking for PT/FT work as a Pharmacy Tech.
Good working conditions, positions open, etc.
So–
[ul]
[li]What qualifications do I need?[/li][li]Do I need a special course, or can I just study at my Uni Library, & try to pass the test? I have a degree, & some other med-related training.[/li][li]Pay range?[/li][li]Your personal experiences as a P Tech?[/li][li]Anything else?[/li][/ul]
I worked as a pharmacy tech part time in college, for a large US drugstore chain. I did not have to have any specific qualifications as I recall. Many of the full time techs were moms who worked while their kids were at school and I know some of them had no training or degrees/certs either. Most everything is learned on the job, from reading doctor’s penmanship, computer system, submitting insurance claims, and the rules for certain meds (allergies, labels to apply, etc.).
IME, the most important skill the techs needed was handling the various insurance scenarios to get people out the door with the meds covered. That was the most difficult part of the job for me, being the intermediary btw the customer and their insurance company. Often people had been at the doctor’s all day or had been at the hospital with a sick child. The last thing they wanted to hear was that the medicine was not covered for some reason. Staying calm, not getting emotionally involved, and being a good listener was important.
The pay was very low (around $6.00/hr in the early nineties) but the job was easy and fun overall. I used to like interacting w/ the customers. If you are a people person, I am sure you will like it, if not, you will probably hate it.
I am also a geek, so I talked quite a bit about medicine with the pharmacists and used to read the little info packets in the drug bottles. In high school, I had actually considered pharmacy as a career, but did not like the high cost of schooling for the first few years at least kept me away. A few years of working as a tech taught me that I made the right decision (for me) in not going into pharmacy. Pharmacists have very difficult working conditions and in my experience they are not treated well, by and large, by the corporations. There is little room for advancement, and not much variety.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has some good info.
Good so far.
Any more info or personal experiences?
In the state of Illinois, all you need to become a licensed Pharmacy Technician is $40 and a lack of felony convictions, although they’re careful to point out that a felony conviction of itself does not disqualify you from becoming a licensed Pharmacy Tech. So all you need is the forty bucks.
This entitles you to work at a retail pharmacy typing and filling prescriptions, and handing them out to customers.
After that, you can become a Certified Pharmacy Technician, which entitles you to actually mix up compound drugs and IV solutions, which means you can work in a hospital pharmacy in addition to working at a retail pharmacy. The CPT test is given several times a year, in different cities around the state, costs IIRC a couple hundred dollars to take, is 3 hours long, and has LOTS of math. All that converting grams into ounces, etc. so as to be able to figure out how much drug to put into the IV solution, etc. CPTs make more money an hour. But even for plain vanilla pharmacy techs, the pay is good, for untrained labor in an indoor not-food-service job. I made $8.00 an hour at Walgreens as a completely untrained plain vanilla Pharmacy Tech.
My experience after a year as a Pharmacy Tech at Walgreens (I am now a cashier out front) is that yeah, handling the insurance issues is the biggest bastard of all. The pharmacy aspect of the job–typing prescriptions, filling pills, etc.–was actually not that difficult. But it’s the eternally baffling ins and outs of “why didn’t my insurance pay for this?” that can drive you straight out through the drive-up window head-first to bash your head on the concrete in merciful release.
Overall, it’s an excellent job to have, if you can handle the insurance issues without needing to wolf down Valiums.
I wanted to add, that generally speaking, if you’re the sort of person who is good at insurance-type things anyway–if you understand all the fine print in your home’s mortgage and your car loan paperwork, if doing your income taxes doesn’t fill you with dread and despair every April 14, if you sit down and do the math when you see a Geico ad and go “hmmm”–then you won’t have any problems with the insurance thing, and will successfully go mano-a-mano with even the most recalcitrant and unhelpful insurance company grunts. Because before you can tell them that they should have paid more, you have to understand yourself exactly WHY they should have paid more, and be able to explain it to them in words of one syllable, or else they’ll eat you alive.