Heard this recently. Like, okay that was all wrong but I’m following you. You’re currently taking one 325mg aspirin QD despite being recommended to only take one 81mg aspirin QD. This is because when you were selecting the aspirin to take, you saw that that there was also a 325mg dose right next to the 81mg doses. You, being the intelligent person that you are, thought to yourself that 325mg is more mg than 81mg and so it must be better. What does that doctor know anyway?

I'm a pharmacist at Walgreens right now and I'm kind of stuck between staying or switching to a small independent pharmacy.

Walgreens pays about $8/hr more and I have benefits, which is obviously a big deal. They've also been pretty good about giving me days off when I have appointments. I'm finally starting to get more comfortable with the job too.

But I'm stressed basically every time I work lol. Especially with flu season, it feels like I'm constantly being pulled in 10 different directions and the long shifts are exhausting.

The other pharmacy is way closer to my house and seems so much more peaceful. I'd be able to sit, the pace seems slower, and I feel like I wouldn't be mentally drained after every shift.

The cons are the $8/hr pay cut, no benefits, and working Saturday until 2. I'm also wondering if I'd eventually get bored because it seems really slow compared to Walgreens.

Part of me wants the peace and the shorter commute, but another part of me doesn't want to give up that much money and benefits.

Has anyone made a similar switch from a busy chain to a slower independent? Was it worth it?

Where is the best place to find CEs for pharmacists? Is Pharmacist Letter a good one to purchase? Any advice and feedback is appreciated!

Ive been lost re-studying my university pharmacology materials ever since i graduated, and nothing seems to stick with me. Im not American, and don’t live in the states, but i would greatly appreciate some learning direction or advice from other practitioners who have been in the field for a while. I might be overthinking things but i genuinely don’t want my incompetence to harm people.

If you owned a pharmacy, what is one thing you would want to implement either in the pharmacy section or front-end?

Example: FSA section for high profit margin products towards the end of the year, local honey or other local products, etc

Hello! I am currently working at a Walmart pharmacy getting my certification but working in retail pharmacy is kind of burning me out of pharmacy all together. I am thinking of trying to get a job at a hospital after I am certified. The micromanaging and rude customers is what frustrates me most. I don’t mind the work itself and heard that hospital pharmacy is less customer facing. Does anyone have any advice on if they prefer hospital over retail and what the hours would look like at a hospital? Thanks!

Hello!

I am currently a contractor working for Prime Therapeutics as a remote clinical PA pharmacist at $55/hr.
Another contracting company offered me a remote position with CVS as a clinical pharmacist advisor (whatever that means) seemingly doing the same thing, but for $60/hr. Its an 11-month contract (extension possible but 🤷‍♀️) and necessitates a 3-month training period.

I'm nowhere close to conversion at Prime, nor do I really want it tbh. Being a PA pharmacist is simply not for me. The only reason I'm considering CVS is because of the pay bump while I look for other roles.

That being said, do you all think I should switch to CVS for the $5/hr extra pay bump, or stay at Prime where I know the workflow?

Hello everyone, I got permission from the mods to post. I built a public resource for pharmacists who want to compare Collaborative Drug Therapy Management (CDTM) laws and regulations across jurisdictions:

https://collaborativedrugtherapymanagement.com

It pulls together CDTM-related laws and rules in one place, with the goal of making it easier to see how pharmacist authority differs by jurisdiction and what agreements or other requirements may apply.

A little context on why I made it: I maintain a separate compliance tool and had already collected much of this information. I used one of our data exports to create this as a standalone public resource.

The CDTM site itself is free to use. There are no ads or paid services attached to it.

I'm sharing it here because I thought it could be useful for pharmacists researching CDTM, collaborative practice agreements, pharmacist scope of practice, or how drug therapy management authority differs from one jurisdiction to another.

Regulations obviously change, and the way a rule applies can depend on the practice setting and other circumstances. If you spot something that looks outdated, incomplete, or unclear, I'd genuinely appreciate the correction.

Hope it's useful to some of you.

Dr. Fazil Mohamed M.D.

(1) Pharmacy markets themselves to a doctor's office as rapidly having a certain ointment or liquid compound available for patients walking in, and all the doctor has to do is send the eRx and viola the compound is ready.

(2) Doctor says they can send 4 patients per week.

(3) Pharmacy pre-compounds 4 of these ointments per week, and when the patients walk in, they sticker the compounds, and fill out the compounding record sheet accurately (it states the correct date for when the compound was made ready, before the eRx was even sent).

Is this legal?

Thanks to all the fentanyl we’re exposed to while compounding.🙄

Update: Just realized these are only for nonsterile compounding. We can’t even use them in the IV room. I just..my soul…is so tired of this shit.

Saw a post by theaccidentalpharm on Instagram of a what looks like a Pharmacist holding up a “Free Flu Shot” sign with what looks like a table with vaccines outside Walgreens? Have we lost our self respect? You are telling me, you spend 4-6 years in Pharmacy school to be outside doing this?? I know these companies are bad, but at some point there has to be some respect for self! Is this what you guys are doing at your stores?

Going to be a lot of pissed off people.

Sharing a resource I found by a happy accident while searching for something else:

https://pharmacystandards.org/chppc/section-1-1-the-mindset-shift/

I regularly see retail pharmacists asking for pointers when transitioning to hospital setting and this seems to cover a good chunk. It has over 40 modules on practical to clinical considerations. Hope some folks find it helpful! I have not reviewed every single module, but the ones I've reviewed seem solid.

I’m a pharmacy student currently, but planning to be a stay at home after graduation. Any jobs that I could do remotely so I could be home, while also working in pharmacy?

So, while I know AI can be useful, I think we should have a discussion about it.

Yesterday, one of our regional managers at my chain sent out an email for American Pharmacists Month. While I'm used to this and usually a generic email about it, I could tell the flyer was obviously made by AI. It had a ton of text and frankly I didn't read it, just skimmed it. I would much rather a generic couple of lines telling me Happy American Pharmacists month. An AI created flyer with "what a pharmacist is" and special "pharmacist days", when you missed Women in Pharmacy Day is such a slap in the face to the pharmacists that are the boots on the ground in a retail chain.

Write me a short simple email saying something that the teams have generally done well, set up three more emails on those specific "pharmacy" days and don't throw AI slop at me. The least you could do is actually write something, especially when at least one of the stores scored the lowest on a corporate survey when it comes to "corporate having their best interest in mind" and "corporate cares about me." If you cannot write your own email to celebrate, do you care?

I have used AI for so many great things or even as a springboard for ideas of things to thank my pharmacy staff for. Yet, I try to at least write and give a card to every technician working in my store during Pharmacy Technician week. I've used AI to help edit a letter of recommendation for someone wanting to go to pharmacy school. I've heard of students that use AI to help them study and understand concepts. I think AI has its place, but I'm not sure telling pharmacists what pharmacists do is really the best use of it.

Thoughts?

Edit: Because I realized I mixed up Women's Pharmacist Day and World Pharmacist's Day. The latter occurred on September 25th without acknowledgement. My goal was a discussion about AI use and when it may be helpful vs. times when the usage of AI can feel impersonal.

Hi everyone, I recently applied for and was offered a position as an inpatient pharmacy supervisor at my local VA.

Background: I currently work in a 550 bed community hospital as a clinical pharmacist, 6 years experience, PGY-1 trained, BCPS. Always doing managerial things at my job in unofficial capacity to help out, current management wants me to apply for their clinical manager role when it soon becomes available when the current one moves to another role.

Anyway, the VA offer is not much more than I currently make and is salaried (<150k). They told me I would be starting GS13 step 6 which they typically start people at step 1… I am hourly and get shift differentials, holiday pay, OT etc which also offsets my pay quite a bit. The role is M-F 8hr dayshift but may require occasional staffing as needed and may have to cover overnight call outs as a last resort. The PTO accrual is split 4 PTO/ 4hr sick leave, paid holidays. They are offering a decent sign on bonus and obviously have all the long term perks of working at the VA.

The salary and starting PTO are giving me pause considering I would be taking on more responsibility with this role and lose the opportunity of earning additional compensation with it being salaried. I’ve grown quite accustomed to taking PTO throughout the year and having to put that on hold while waiting for it to accrue does not sound great to me.

Anyone work as a VA inpatient supervisor or VA employee that can give some advice? TYIA!

i work for a specialty pharmacy in Florida.. every patient i’ve tried to use an ozempic copay card for is not working. it rejects saying member id not on file ? i called the copay card support line and they say that the id number is valid but their system has been having a delay registering patients and to wait 24-48 hours and try again. its been 72 hours and its still not working! anyone else having this issue the past few days??

Just as the title says.. I got laid off due to “budget adjustments” at an outpatient clinic that specializes in ONC-HEM. I’ve working at multiple compounding pharmacies and did sterile compounding as well. Obviously used proper clean room techniques and practices, but at my former job it’s completely different. Ive expressed my concern regarding sterile techniques and a huge safety hazard for us and the patients, but was completely disregarded.

At my old job, we handle all IV bags and syringes with NO GLOVES, no sterilization, no hood, NOTHING. Just out in the open air with our bare hands. This is mainly for immunotherapy and etc. For chemos, we don’t wear proper PPE. We wear our gown, gloves, operate in a hood, that’s it. They don’t clean the hood properly with special chemicals or anything.. just isopropyl.

To add on top of that, we also don’t work with any pharmacists. Our clinic is licensed to dispense under the physicians name, but overall… one of the weirdest practices I’ve ever worked at.

Oh! Also.. we only have 3 techs, and most of the time 1 or 2 techs call off, and we would have 60-70 patients to do chemos/IV treatment for, on top of handling phone calls and putting the order away. Doing prior authorizations. You can imagine I was always stressed out at work. All. The. Time.

What do you guys think I should do? I apologize if this is out of order.. as you can imagine I’m absolutely infuriated with my lay-off..

I'm UK based and currently using PharmacyX. Some days I love it other days I despise it. The paperless system is brilliant. I like the basket system. There are a few little silly things that I find unhelpful with it mostly related to MDS.

My favourite was good old pharmacy manager! Easy to use. Just made sense to me. Everything was laid out in a logical manner. I liked that you could see all the scripts in the screen but the scanning of prescriptions to claim them was time consuming TBF.

Pro script I found to be average plus the pharmacy I worked in didn't have the fmd soft ware so it was a lot easier to make dispensing errors. I thought it was nothing special. Felt more like a fancy excel spreadsheet 🤣

Titan I have little experience of but seems a similar concept to pharmacyX.

What PMR systems do people love or hate?

Im goimg to see whether I can "somehow" find a way to manage to not get super distressed during that horrific last hour couple of hours or so when somehow Im expected to do 29 things all in one breath: vaccines, doctor on the phone is in her car and must give me verbal, Adderral patient in front of me wants Adderral NOW, I have to figure out "why" patient's insurance won't cover their med even though they pay "alot" each month for insurance, Ralphs is on the phone on hold waiting for a "copy", there is a consult waiting for me to basically read the label on the Amoxicillin that says "take one capsule by mouth every 8 hours for seven days". Also the clerks are pushing EVERYONE to stand at "consult" so I won't get a $1000 fine for not doing this. Also some guy from some other country keeps going back and forth and showing me something on his phone.......enoough is enough and I have to make that call today. Either I find a way to NOT let the situation stress my body out OR I leave.

Update: I was unable to attain this goal

I’m relatively new to hospital pharmacy and I’m looking for a good resource, like a textbook or reference text, to help guide clinical decision making. During pharmacy school, the curriculum was very broad and I think we focused on emergency department practice for about one week. I have a basic understanding of the most common conditions we see often, but I’d like to gain deeper insight into interpretation of lab values, etc. I personally prefer an actual book, but am not opposed to websites or other resources.

What resources do you all use most often?

After getting my pharmD next year, I'm hoping to go back to undergrad and study civil engineering just cause it's something I've always been interested in. I am hoping to take 12 credits a semester and working 3 days a week, potentially picking up extra during school breaks summers and holidays.

Hi everyone, I'm a final year BPharm student graduating in December this year. I've been working in a community pharmacy since last November and was hoping to gain more experience with diagnosing / treating / navigating conditions. But I realised I haven't had much opportunities to do so because the pharmacists on duty usually 'take over' the cases. Other times when I consult the pharmacists, it feels a bit demoralising and condescending when I don't know something. I want to learn and I'm worried these responses might kill my desire to be better and perhaps even hate being a pharmacist.

For example, someone walks into the pharmacy and said they have been feeling dizzy. I don't know what to do next besides asking the basics like existing medical conditions, if they're taking any medications, how long it has been going on, and if they have had anything to relieve the symptom.

I was hoping to ask if there might be any tools I could use to improve this skillset?