What You Learn From a Pharmacy Assistant Course

In a pharmacy assistant program, you learn how to do key tasks that help pharmacies in both retail and hospital settings, but it’s more than just running around and doing clerical work. Pharmacy assistants are a key role in the industry and are necessary, as many pharmacies wouldn’t be able to function without them. 

Some of the main things that a pharmacy assistant course can teach you are: 

• Learning the duties of a pharmacy assistant

• Theoretical and applied knowledge

• How to work in a pharmacy setting

Learning the duties of a pharmacy assistant 

A pharmacy assistant program will teach you all about the duties and responsibilities that come with the role, and how you can do your job the best. These duties include: 

• Preparing medication, filling prescriptions under supervision  

• Maintaining proper drug storage 

• Entering data such as prescriptions and patient information into the computer systems 

• Helping to prepare, package, and label prescriptions 

• Maintaining inventory of prescription record keeping systems 

• Placing and receiving orders

Theoretical and applied knowledge

While a pharmacy assistant program is very practical, there’s also other things that you learn in a pharmacy assistant course. Subjects like anatomy and physiology come in handy since you’ll need to know processes of the body. With anatomy, you learn about body structures, and with physiology, you’ll learn about the functions of the body systems. This will go on to further help students with pharmacology, and the effect that medications have on the body. 

With pharmacology, students will learn all the concrete knowledge they need to know about different drugs and how to apply that knowledge in a pharmacy setting. Much of the content is focused on brand names and generic names of medications, what they are and how to tell the difference. It will touch base on classifications, drugs that sound or look similar, and what sort of adverse effects they can have as well. This helps to reduce duplicates of medications that are from the same class, and therefore will reduce dispensing errors. 

How to work in a pharmacy setting

In addition to the above, a pharmacy assistant course also lets students also get the opportunity to work in a pharmacy setting. First, students will get the chance to work in a mock pharmacy on campus to understand what it will be like, and near the end of their program they will get the chance to complete their practicum, allowing them to work in a real pharmacy.

This gradual exposure will get students comfortable and confident with working with community members, pharmacists, and other staff. By having this, they’ll be prepared to take on different types of pharmacy assistant roles such as hospital assistant, clinic assistant, compounding assistant and more. 

ABM College’s Pharmacy Assistant program in Alberta will prepare you for the industry by teaching you everything you need to know to have a successful career. From having a pharmacy setting on campus to giving students the opportunity to work in a real pharmacy, ABM College sets their students up well to get a job in the field right after they graduate.