Working in a pharmacy with no medications...

This summer I am interning at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. I am an outpatient pharmacy intern and will be rotating through six different outpatient pharmacies during the duration of my program. As a Minnesota native, I have grown up hearing about the Mayo Clinic practically every day but for some of you who aren’t as familiar with this hospital system, here are a few basic facts. The Mayo Clinic is the largest integrated medical center in the world and serves more than 350,000 patients per year. More specifically, the outpatient pharmacies see about 1,000 patients per day and process approximately 4,000 prescriptions daily.

Because of the huge volume of patients seen at the various outpatient pharmacies, the Mayo Clinic utilizes a separate medication filling center, allowing for two of its six outpatient pharmacies to focus their efforts on patient counseling and worry less about the actual counting of prescriptions because there isn’t actually any filling of medications at these two locations.

Let me explain a little bit more about how this process works. Basically, a patient brings a new or refill prescription to our pharmacy where a technician enters it into the computer system. While the prescription is being entered, the pharmacist counsels the patient on their medications and answers any questions they may have. All of the pharmacists I have worked with so far utilize the three question approach we learned in PCare (What did the doctor tell you this medication was for? How did the doctor tell you to take this medication? What side effects did the doctor tell you to expect with this medication?). After the prescription is entered into the computer, it is scanned, verified by a pharmacist, and sent off to the filling center. There, the prescription is filled, checked by a pharmacist, and sent back to our pharmacy through a tube system where the patient can pick it up roughly 30 minutes after dropping it off.

I was very surprised when I first learned that they did not have any medications in the pharmacy but so far the process seems to run very smoothly. It’s great to see the pharmacists spending the majority of their time counseling patients on their medications and less time counting pills and checking orders. It was also very encouraging to see some of the exact same patient counseling techniques we learned in PCare put into practice in the real world and how effective they can be when communicating with patients. Looks like we really will use some of the things we learn in school!