NHS Band 4 Pharmacy Technician Mock Interview
Master 30 NHS Band 4 Pharmacy Technician interview questions covering clinical checks, medicines management, and patient safety.
Question 12 of 30
As a pharmacy technician, how do you prevent errors in the workplace?
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Jaymie Payne is passionate about talent acquistion and has nine years of experience in corporate and healthcare recruitment.
"In my job shadowing, I realized that a majority of errors can be prevented at the prescription drop-off station. Having a checklist of critical patient information that the technician should obtain from each patient is important. The date of birth should be written on every hard copy prescription, so the pharmacist has a second identifier readily available during verification. Allergies should also clearly be noted so that the pharmacist can look for issues that may potentially cause the patient harm.
Another important lesson I learned was that computer-generated alerts should never be ignored. It is important that all alerts that involve medication interactions, allergies, duplications, and other clinical warnings should be relayed to the pharmacist as this will help prevent errors."
Jaymie Payne is passionate about talent acquistion and has nine years of experience in corporate and healthcare recruitment.
Pharmacy technicians play a major role in modern pharmacy practice and patient safety. To best protect patients, pharmacy technicians must strictly adhere to system-based processes and inform the pharmacist whenever they have questions or concerns. Consider the steps of the pharmacy process from prescription drop-off, order entry, filling/dispensing, and point of sale, and describe at least two ways that you prevent errors in the workplace.
Jaymie Payne is passionate about talent acquistion and has nine years of experience in corporate and healthcare recruitment.
"Many mix-ups occur during the filling and dispensing phase due to incorrectly reading a label. Physically separating drugs with look-alike labels and packaging can help reduce these types of errors. Using bar code technology, viewing scanned images of products and prescriptions by pharmacists, and other technology for verification in the production process will help reduce and prevent errors in this stage of the process.
Additionally, errors may also occur with a correctly filled prescription if it is dispensed to a patient for whom it is not intended. These types of errors can be prevented by using a second identifier at the register, for example, a name and address or date of birth. I then check this against the information on the medication bottle."
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