Pharmacy Technician Professional (ASHP/ACPE)

Apprenticeship Program

This course will benefit anyone considering a career in allied health, as well as those already working in the field. Allied Health Professionals must be committed to the key attributes of professionalism and strive to reflect this within the delivery of patient-centered safe and effective care. “Professionalism” is a broad term that reflects many different skills and abilities. For an individual to exhibit professionalism, he/she must be armed with specific skills and abilities that do not always show up within certification requirements, or even within a career training curriculum. Soft skills are hard to measure and are typically less well-defined than hard skills. However, soft skills are what set many job candidates apart. Professionalism is not just what one knows, it is how one does their job, how one behaves and how one comes across as they interact with others.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with soft skills training that will provide the tools needed to demonstrate a higher level of professionalism on the job. Key components of the course focus on patient interaction, proper office behavior, medical ethics, diversity and cultural bias, emotional strength, professional appearance and communication. The course maintains a focus on the key attributes that are true markers of professionalism.

This course was created with input from healthcare professionals working in the field, healthcare employers that hire our graduates, professional educators and even former MedCerts students. The end result is a collection of modules that touch on the soft skills that are TRULY important in the real world of allied healthcare. In this course, students are engaged through scenario-based learning that allows for real interaction with virtual co-workers and patients. Additionally, game-based activities keep students engaged and entertained throughout their learning journey.

This course is designed to familiarize the student with the language of medicine, through the study of prefixes, suffixes, root words, abbreviation, and pronunciation of words. The curriculum also includes an anatomy and physiology app that enables students to explore, visualize, interact, and experience the anatomy of the human body in 3D and augmented reality (AR). Students will examine the organization of the integumentary, musculoskeletal, hematic, lymphatic and immune, and cardiovascular systems in the human body. They will become familiar with the medical terms that relate to the respiratory, digestive, nervous, endocrine, reproductive, and excretory systems. Students will also examine terms related to the sensory organs, with a concentration on the organs for hearing, sight, and smell. This immersive experience will trigger thought processes and enhance learning outcomes in their Anatomy and Physiology program. The app has about 50 simulations across different topics.

This Pharmacy Technician course is designed to education and train the student in the diverse field of Pharmacy Technology. The student will be provided didactic coursework in the areas of prescription processing, pharmacy nomenclature, biopharmaceutics and drug activity, dosage calculations, and common mathematical formulas and conversions. Consideration of drug routes and formulations includes tablets and capsules, liquid prescriptions, parenteral and enteral, and insulin and syringes. To better understand the business side of the pharmacy world, students will learn about HIPAA, drug regulation and control, inventory management, financial considerations, legal and ethical issues, sterile and non-sterile compounding, and units of measurement. Throughout the course, the student will perform realistic pharmacy simulations that duplicate tasks performed in the work environment.

The Didactic Component of the RX 3000 Program is designed to provide instruction, theory, and knowledge of the pharmacy profession to the student as they progress through their courses. The different knowledge based areas that the student will be exposed to consist of: Origins of medicine, pharmacy law, HIV and AIDS, pharmacy terminology, reference and research tools, medication order processing, dosage forms, routes of administration, medical coding, billing, and reimbursement, Medication Therapy Management, Rick Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, basic biopharmaceutics and drug activities, inventory management, sterile and non-sterile compounding regulations, pre-packaging, HIPAA and HI-TECH Privacy Act, drug regulation and control, pharmacy equipment, medication formulation, emergency preparedness, safety and aseptic technique, patient empathy and effective communication, units of measurement, pharmaceutical terminology, dosage calculations, the metric system, and common mathematical formulas and conversions.

Th Simulation Component of the RX 3000 is designed to provide hands on experience for the student with different scenarios that will be performed by the pharmacy technician in various practice settings. In this portion of the course, students will watch demonstrations of their instructor performing various activities in which they will have to perform for evaluation and grading of accuracy, as well as being able to explain the steps properly with detailed explanations. Some of the simulations the student will be performing are hazardous waste disposal, prescription processing, sterile and non-sterile compounding, laminar flow hood cleaning and aseptic technique, proper gowning procedures, hand washing and gloving, prepackaging and unit dose preparations, reconstitution of antibiotics and injectable medications, oral liquids, parenteral preperations, chemotherapy preparations, narcotic preparations, large and small volume preparations, ampule preparations, and total parenteral nutrition preparations.

The Experiential Component of the RX 3000 Program is designed to allow the student to complete their training in an approved pharmacy setting under the instruction of a licensed pharmacist. Here, the student will be evaluated by putting in to practice the skills and knowledge acquired in the Didactic and Simulation portions of the RX 3000 course. To facilitate in this process, we offer assistance to the student to ensure their experiential training is a success. We provide guidance and instruction for the student for state board of pharmacy registration and licensing, as well as securing their externship site. This ensures that the student will have proper credentials while on their site. During their rotation of 160 hours, the students will be evaluated as they reach certain benchmarks of their externship. At the completion of their externship, the pharmacy preceptor will meet with the student to discuss their strengths, weaknesses, and areas that need refinement. In addition, the student will have an opportunity to evaluate their experience at the experiential site, as well as the preceptor who evaluated their training.