Wednesday, September 13, 2006

KK day 1-3

Being at kk for 3 days already. It's pretty an eye-opening experience for me.

Day 1
1) Facility tour
A pharmacy technician (PT) brought us around the different departments in the hospital like the woman/children inpatient, oncology pharmacy, staff lounge(where we can get cheaper food)

2) Outpatient Pharmacy (retail)

i) We were asked to look at pictures of how labels were placed on a computer, then the PT demostrated on what are some things we need to take note when pasting label i.e alignment, not to paste on the expire date, strength of drugs etc.

ii) We were given some previous prescriptions to look at, in order to get us familarise with the calculation of the doses

iii) spent some time familarising the location of the drugs, note how they organised the drugs into diff. category (oral sol./susp. , tablet, creams and inhaler)

Day 2
1) Purchasing and store mgmt

i) The senior phamacist gave us a lecture on how their purchasing and store management are done. Hence we get to look at some of their contracts and P.O that they did. Terms like exempted items, ad-hock, indented items and ex-items are some new words that we learnt.
* The store is holding 1 million dollars of drugs!!! woot. So much

ii) Following that, we went into the store, which look pretty much like a storeroom/ warehouse to me, to work with a PT as well. And of course we were pretty much bully to pack stuff. At first, we were ask to check the items on a trolley, to see whether they are correct. Then she gave us a long list of drugs items that the inpatient pharmacies needed. So we pushed a trolley each to get the different items. The most tiring part was, some of the items they needed 50 boxes! Some needed 5 cartons!~ Kao~! I became a coolie carrying bulks of drugs to the trolley. Heavy ok!

2) project discussion
I am under a lady pharmacist, but she don't look friendly on the outside. However, after speaking to her, she sounded fine. She is a busy lady, though the meeting time was 4pm, i waited for her for 1/2 hour before i get to see her.

"Update for dilution guideline". That's the temporary title of my project. My project supervisor ask me to think of a more sei name... any idea how to make my project title more glamorous?
haha

Day 3
1) Oncology pharmacy

Spent the whole day there. The place there was small and cosy, we never really did much things there besides:

• Viewing how the PT prepared cytotoxic drugs in a isolator(vertical airflow laminator)
• Mini talks by the pharmacists on how the onco-pharmacy work, how they counsel patients, understanding of the common cancers that they handle

Some interest experiences i get to watch today was (poor kumaran: he didn't get to watch it, as either the session was in chinese or the patient was a female) :

• How the pharmacist counsel a breast cancer patient. It was like a chatting session, the pharmacist informed patient, who is a first timer, of the drugs they will be under, the side effects, stuff they have to take note off etc...
• How a intrathecal procedure chemotherapy was done. It was really a very sad experience to watch la... I watched how a child was given drugs by the spinal cord. The child wasn't given any LA. So brave of the child.

After watching all these, i really think, we should take care of our health and never fall sick. The process is painful and alot of money is involved in treating. So people, take good care of our health!

Health is wealth