The Pharmacy Technician Blog

I took the PTCE through Pearson Vue in Tampa Florida. Pearson Vue administers professional exams for a variety of industries throughout the country. The facility and the testing environment was excellent (which I mentioned in the survey you have to take at the end of the exam).

The Pharmacy Technician Certification Board switched to a computer-based test early this year. This made the test easy to take and less stressful (I thought) than a pencil and paper test. There was a software calculator, but they also provided a real calculator in case you wanted it, and scratch paper.

Ok, for the material on the test itself - I have a few bits of advice.

Study from several sources, or at least 1 very comprehensive source (class, course or series of books - although this is more expensive). If I had used only 1 of the 3 sources I had studied from, I would have done worse on the test. Why? Each of the sources I used would ask the same question in slightly different ways. This helped prepare me for the test - which worded the same types of questions very differently.

Focus on pharmacology early in your study. The Pharmacytrainer.com course I used put pharmacology almost at the end of the course. This was by far the biggest chapter in the course. By then, I had been used to short, relatively easy chapters. I was only days away from the test and I suddenly had an enormous amount of material to study. Luckily, I had already started studying some of that material from my other sources. I still had to cram a bit the days before the test.

Be prepared for subjects you don’t expect to focus on. There were 3 or so questions on flow hoods and 3 or so on perpetual inventory. Two subjects I had barely studied. I think I reasoned out the questions well and took good guesses.

Watch the units! There will be questions where you not only have to work out the equation, but you need to convert the units. If the answer needs to be in kilograms, be sure the weight given is in kg or convert it!

Read the question carefully! They will often give you more information than you need in order to answer the question. Don’t be misled into working out the wrong answer.

Know the most common brands and generics. Know the pharmacy laws. Know the drug classes. There were lots of questions on beta blockers, insulin, various antibiotics etc.

You don’t need to know everything, but be prepared to make good guesses.

Ok. So, I haven’t posted in a while. Aside from the usual life and work, I have been studying hard for the Pharmacy Technician Certification Exam. I took the test last Saturday and just yesterday (one week later) I received my score and Certificate from PTCB. I got better scores than I expected, given how I felt after the test.

There is a total score (on a scale of 300-900, 650 is passing) and there are scores for three main ’subtests’ with individual scores as well. My scores break down like this:

Total Scaled Score : 816

Assist Pharmacist in Serving Patients : 803

Maintain Med. Inventory Control Systems : 869

Admin. Mgmt. of Pharmacy Practice : 795

Any course or book you study from will break down the categories in a similar way, in order to focus on the most important areas to study for taking the test. I will post my assessment of the test and reviews of the course and books I’ve used to study in the next few days. Right now, I’m taking a little breather from non-work pharmacy time.

Ron Tichenor, CPhT

So far my study routine has been like this :

Study 1 chapter per night on http://www.pharmacytrainer.com/ . I aim for this, but don’t always hit it. I’m about a third of the way through the course so far.

Study a few minutes with BYKI. I’ve completed making card sets for the Top 200 Drugs (brand name and generics), Common Greek and Latin Roots, Prefixes and Suffixes (not really necessary, but it helps me learn and memorize what conditions drugs are used for) and Sig Codes for prescriptions. I have a lot of other sets to make, and I put in a few minutes a night adding to new sets.

When I’m done with the online course, I’ll review with Mike Johnstons Fundamentals of Pharmacy Practice and take lots more practice questions and practice tests with the Q and A Review for the Pharmacy Technician.

So far I haven’t had trouble with anything. Having a few months of on-the-job experienced has obviously helped a lot. I review things at work everyday, and the pharmacists are there to answer any questions I have. I’ve got my authorization to take the PTCE, I just need to schedule it.

We finally got in some of the generic for Lamisil. I’ve been taking it myself and was curious as to the price change. It is normally significant for any new generic. (Actually, I’m not sure how long Lamisil has been off patent - it may just have been a while before our wholesaler got it to us. We weren’t ordering it. It just came in the order one day as a new drug).

 Anyway, the price change was big. Roundabout figures (for my employee discount price, this doesn’t factor in insurance) - $360 for 30 tablets (30 day supply) of Lamisil. $14 for 30 tablets of Terbinafine. Same medication. If I need to continue using it (and it has been effective, by the way), which do you think I will use?

Drugs on patent make the pharmaceutical companies BIG money, and the generics are the same medication. Use them whenever you can.

I’ve decided on an online pharmacy technician certification course. I’ve bought a course with http://www.pharmacytrainer.com/ It’s about the same price (or less) than I would pay if I got (yet another) pharmacy technican study book. It certainly can’t be much worse than others, and it might even be good enough. I’ve gone through the first 6 chapters easily enough. There’s not much there that I haven’t already learned from other sources, but I do like the presentation. It’s simple and in plain English where it should be. Things appear to be laid out well. I’ll post updates as I go along and then eventually a full review.

I watched the Dateline NBC special last night about counterfeit medications making their way into US pharmacies. It’s scary stuff, but at the same time it’s not very likely that someone would get a counterfeit medication. Any pharmacy worth its salt is buying from a reputable wholesaler, which are highly regulated by the government.

The only real danger I can imagine is people buying medications from an unknown seller on the internet. Even if they seem trustworthy, with a glitzy website and all, they are still unknown. It’s extremely risky.

Of course, one of the first calls this morning to the pharmacy was a customer who had seen the special and wanted to know if our medications were safe. People watch way too much TV.

After I had started working as a pharmacy technician, I began to look around for some study materials to begin studying for certification. The first thing I got was Q&A Review for the Pharmacy Technician (by Stoogenke and Le). This is basically just review questions and practice tests for pharmacy tecnician exams.

As I looked over these practice tests, I began to identify areas where my on-the-job-training wasn’t going to teach me what I need to pass the test. So, I looked for some other study materials. Most of the books I found were not reviewed well on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. They all seemed to have some kind of problems or were lacking something, at least according to some of the reviewers.

 I decided to get one other book - Fundamentals of Pharmacy Practice by Mike Johnston of the NPTA. I won’t do a full review until I read the whole thing, but it is clear that the book is just part of their Pharmacy Technician series, and you need the whole set to get the most out of it. Unfortunately, that would be expensive. I’m not looking to spend that much preparing for this test.

So, I’m looking for some other source to fill in the gaps in my training. I think an online training course might work well for me if I can find one reasonable in price and the promise of a good return on my money. When I settle on something, I’ll post it with my thoughts on how it compares to other methods of preparing for the pharmacy technician certification test. And of course, full reviews of any other books or learning materials I get.

I had heard about pro wrestler Chris Benoit killing himself and his family, but I just read a report about some of the findings by investigators. Sure, we can all speculate about the effects of the steroids that he was on and mixed with the Xanax and hydrocodone he was also taking.

 But I just read about his family. His wife tested positive for Xanax, hydrocodone and hydromorphone. And the shocking part was that his 7 year old son was also found to have Xanax in his system. I’m not going to speculate on what happened there, but the part that got me was about the doctor.

 Benoit’s personal physician, Dr. Phil Astin, was charged with improperly prescribing painkillers and other drugs to two patients other than Benoit. It seems he was a little loose with the pen when it came to prescribing medications. It also seems that Benoit was a little too comfortable taking medications that most of us would handle with extreme care.

 If it turns out that Dr. Astin was guilty of prescribing medications improperly for Benoit, he should not only lose his license, but he should be charged with criminal charges. His improper prescriptions may have played a big part in the deaths of three people.

The Wyoming State Board Of Pharmacy is considering mandatory, standardized education as a requirement for NEW pharmacy technicians, to take effect in 2010. The Board has approved these regulations in the past…only to see Governor Dave Freudenthal VETO the provision.

This is from an email from the NPTA (National Pharmacy Technician Association) requesting pharmacy techs to help influence the governor of Wyoming to approve the revisions to help improve standards for pharmacy technicians. As I’ve said before, it’s only a matter of time before all states in the US (and possibly the Federal Govt as well) put in place mandatory requirements for pharmacy technicians.

And, it’s another reason why now is such a good time to get into this field and get some experience before the standards (and therefore the pay and benefits) begin to rise.

One of the tools I’m using to study for the pharmacy tech certification is a flashcard program. A lot of the little details that you need to memorize can easily be put into a program and studied for just a few minutes a day. I use a program called BYKI (Before You Know It) by Transparent Language (http://www.byki.com/). Although this program is for studying foreign languages, it can be used to study anything. There is a free version, but only the pay version has the feature for making your own lists.

So far, I’ve just made lists for memorizing prefixes, suffixes and roots with their meanings (you know card- has to do with the heart, pulmo- has to do with the lungs, etc) and lists of the most common drugs and their generics. Other lists I’ll make are for prescription abbreviations and maybe medical definitions. There are other flashcard programs for free out there like Supermemo, but I already use BYKI a lot for studying languages, so it was just easy for me to begin to use it for this.

 I highly recommend to anyone studying for your certification to supplement books with something like this.