I am not Some Common Sense.
Health – I have several corollaries I can derive but for your privacy, I won’t continue this.
WinnieThePooh – In retail/community pharmacy, most of the information relating to drug classification, adverse events, dosing, duplicate therapies and drug combinations are used daily. Most pharmacy systems have a tool to identify drug interaction and therapeutic duplications and it’s my job as the pharmacist to decide what is real and what is not, what I know to be a problem and what is not. Some interactions or duplicate therapies are not a problem. Some are major problems. That’s my call.
Some of the information learnt is not used on a day-to-day basis but will pop up when least expected. Just the other day, I was asked by a doctor to recommend a dose of a certain antibiotic and how the medication could be converted to a liquid. That requires knowledge of dosing, antibacterial coverage, drug formulation and compounding techniques. That is not a frequent question but one that I have to be prepared for.
Mind you, if I’m in a hospital, those types of questions come up much more frequently. Or if I’m industry, I’m going to have very few clinical question but will spend most of time doing drug formulations.
There is a system of counting and verifying that does take control of the day but there is always those few things that occur every shift that make it interesting. Be customer behavior, customer questions, be it a hilarious mistake in a prescription, be it a life-threatening mistake in a prescription or a life-threatening drug combination that occurs – there’s always something that throws off the monotony.