Adam James
Regardless of the field, we work in, we all have a few gripes! One of the first places we go to air them is social media.
If you’re a pharmacy technician, you’re no different.
Some of your colleagues talk about impatient customers, groan about weekend shifts, but many can go on and on about pill counting.
Here’s a sample:
And while it is a significant part of the job, there can be risks associated with hand-counting pills, including miscounting medication.
Professionals who distribute prescription medication regularly are trained to be meticulous and have systems in place to reduce mistakes. However, sometimes an unfortunate error can occur; we are human after all.
An automatic pill counter helps to reduce these mistakes to help avoid lawsuits whether you’re working in a pharmacy or veterinarian clinic. There are even automatic counters that count inventory and even dispense the medication for you, saving you time for other important tasks.
Veterinarians
Just like the vet has to prescribe the correct dosage of medication for a furry patient, it’s the veterinary technician’s job to count and dispense the correct medication. Each is just as important, and if any detail is misread or miscounted, the consequence can involve a lawsuit, or worse—the death of a patient.
Having an automatic pill counter not only eliminates mistakes made from hand counting, it also saves time. This time can be used for more face-to-face time with patients and their owners and can also reduce the hours of over-worked employees. Although long hours aren’t always avoidable in the medical industry, a tired or stressed employee has a greater chance of making a mistake that can severely affect a patient, the practice and their career.
Pharmacies
We have all heard the jokes—“Pharmacists just count pills all day.” However, that is simply not true. There is so much more work that goes into being a pharmacist than patients know.
Pharmacists review and interpret a doctor’s prescription, package and label medication, and even counsel patients on drug therapies. They also train pharmacy technicians, who take prescriptions, help mix medicines, count pills, measure medication, label and provide accurate directions for medication and the list goes on.
An automatic pill counter can help free up time for a technician to tend to patients and learn more from the pharmacists. Not to mention, the pill counter reduces mistakes made in the pharmacy. There have been too many pharmacy malpractice lawsuits that result in harm to a patient and grieving families.
