End of Year Review: NAHPT
Written by Leonor O’Connor, President, National Association of Hospital Pharmacy Technicians
It has been a very interesting and professionally progressive year for hospital pharmacy technicians
Pharmacy Technicians have expanded their roles particularly in the last two years and it is widely recognised that the experience they have is invaluable and a huge support to pharmacists not only in their traditional roles but also in the development of new systems. In order to ensure that pharmacy technicians are of a consistently high standard to meet the needs of the ever-expanding roles we are now involved in, it is important to ensure standards of education and training and continued professional development are high. The NAHPT would like to see the introduction of professional registration of pharmacy technicians to ensure that the standard of excellence which is very often reflected in the work that we do is consistent amongst all pharmacy technicians through regulation. We are continuing to look at our options for regulation and conducted a fact-finding exercise to ascertain the requirements for regulation. We met with pharmacy technician course co-ordinators, contacted professional healthcare regulators and met with the PSI registrar to assess the support for and process required to proceed with the regulation of pharmacy technicians. The PSI agreed that they would be the most natural fit as a pharmacy regulator for pharmacy technicians to be registered with as opposed to other professional healthcare regulators but at present pharmacy technicians are not designated for professional registration by the department of health. We therefore would need support for pharmacy technicians to be added to the department of health list of healthcare professions that require registration. We provided feedback to our members and conducted an initial hospital pharmacy technician survey to establish the interest/support for registration before we pursue this challenging process any further. Although not exhaustive the initial results of the survey showed that 94% of the pharmacy technicians that responded are in favour of pursing professional registration.
Sector-
Education: RCSI, University of Medicines and Health Sciences
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Contribute to the design, development, and delivery of the school’s educational programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
• Assisting the development, preparation, delivery, and assessment in the broad areas of pharmacy including pharmacy practice, clinical pharmacy and pharmaceutics.
• Work alongside academic staff, teacher-practitioners, practice educators and the technical team to ensure an authentic learning experience for students.
Sector-
HSE Procurement: National Pharmacy Procurement Team
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Manage tender processes for high-cost drugs.
• Develop documentation for tender processes.
• Qualify applications from drug companies for registration to the HSE Dynamic Purchasing System for authorised medicines.
Sector-
Professional Representative Organisation: Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU)
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Contract administrator.
• Advising and assisting IPU members on the administration of the Community Pharmacy Contractors Agreement, in particular processing claims and payments, and administering the HSE community drugs schemes.
CPD: Irish Institute of Pharmacy (IIOP)
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Operations coordinator.
• Look after the Institute’s Finance system and provide administrative support to the IIOP Team.
• Support a range of projects in the IIOP including the webinar series, the IIOP newsletter and the support helpdesk.
Sector-
HSE Reimbursement: PCRS
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Processing and analysing new medicinal product applications.
• Receipt and management of Product Discontinuation Notifications and of Product Shortages Notifications.
• Co-operate with other PCRS functions (e.g., Drugs Unit, Finance, Operations) to ensure appropriate
reimbursement (including governance and reporting) arrangements are in place for all medicines.
Sector-
HSE: Vaccination Team
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Medicines management.
• Receipt and secure storage of vaccines.
• Distribution, workflow management and dose reconciliation.
• Validation and management of the cold chain.
Sector-
HSE: National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP)
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
The three roles are;
1. Cancer Drug Management programme – primarily focused on the development and review of the national
chemotherapy regimens as well as quality services.
2. Systemic Therapy Programme – primarily focused on funding and audit considerations for cancer drugs
including ODMS and other streams.
3. National Cancer Information system (NCIS) – primarily focused on national regimen building for NCIS.
• The technicians play a key role within each of these small teams and their roles continue to grow and evolve
in response to the service needs.
Sector-
GP Out of Hours
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Medicines management.
• Compiling stock orders of all medicines as well as dressings/ostomy products/sharps bins/PPE etc.
• Monitoring of and stocking medication bags for house calls.
• Working alongside Doctors and Clinical nurses.
• Maintenance of ECG machines and defibrillator.
Sector-
Wholesale: Uniphar
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Customer service role concerned with the supply of EMP’s and other procured goods.
• Customer advisory services.
• Provision of technical support.
Sector-
HSE: GUIDe (Sexual Health)
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Dispensing and counselling of patients on appropriate use of ARVs, ID and STI medications.
• Medicines reconciliation DDI checking for patients.
• Maintaining stock levels for pharmacy and liaising with procurement around expected shorts.
• Liaising with Irish prison services managing ART for inmates.
• Creating reports on cost/usage.
Sector-
Research: Clinical Trials
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Adhere to procedures to ensure the safe and correct ordering, receipt, recording, handling, storage,
dispensing, administration, quarantining and destruction of investigational medicinal products (ATIMPS/ IMPs)
including investigation and rectification of discrepancies.
• Providing technical direction and assistance with clinical trial protocols.
• Liaise with trial sponsor representatives and prepare pharmacy documentation for monitoring visits and follow
up and action any monitoring visit finding.
Sector-
Hospital: Medicines Management / Ward Based**
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• Medicines reconciliation and kardex review.
• Review of drug trolleys/presses.
• Provide patient education.
• Ordering and supply of non-stock medications.
• Support audit and data collection for service-based activities.
Sector-
Commercial Sales: Key Account Manager in Specialised Medicines, ULM supply, and Medication shortages
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• This position requires the Pharmacy Technician to assess the supply chains globally, review product suitability
and help ensure continuity of supply.
There is a requirement to be able to:
• Maintain and develop relationships with Hospital Pharmacy Teams
• React quickly to shortages
• Offer solutions to supply new therapies that currently are unavailable in Ireland due to external challenges, by
partnering with companies in other markets i.e Brexit, Temp Controlled Shipments
• Managing logistics and meeting quality standards throughout
• Identify potential critical medication unavailable in the market
Sector-
Clinical Support Specialist for a pharmaceutical wholesale business.
Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
• The focus of the role is to provide expert clinical support to the business, liaising with both internal and
external stakeholders.
• The role supports the growth of the business by working with management to assess the market landscape,
provide product training and demonstrations to both internal and external stakeholders, educate the business
on clinical indications for both existing and new products, Review SmPC’s, and Analyse clinically, market
opportunities to identify gaps in the market and opportunities to optimise product portfolio.
Sector-
HSE Acute Hospitals Drugs Management Programme (AHDMP) Pharmacy Technician roles and responsibilities-
Role in the Hospital Medicines Management System (HMMS) project team.
• Responsible for the implementation of a national hospital pharmacy medicines management system.
This is modern pharmacy software with increased functionality in key areas such systems integration, drug
procurement, inventory management, ward-based activities and finance. HMMS will also become the
platform to support electronic prescribing and electronic medicines in the future in Irish hospitals.
• Involved in building a drug file and supplier builds, working with pharmacy focus groups e.g., dispensary,
clozapine, clinical trials to map workflows and identify how they use pharmacy software systems at present.
• Currently training on this new software and will be involved in testing before we go live as well as providing
on-site support to pharmacy staff.
** This year Connolly Hospital Medicines management technician (MMT) service was shortlisted for a HSE excellence award. The HSE excellence awards are an opportunity to showcase and celebrate the good work that is happening in the HSE every day. The MMT service was entered under the Innovation and service delivery category and the title of project was “Delivering safer, more cost-effective medication management through Pharmacy skill-mix innovation”
Update on some of the additional activities of the Association this year:
All educational in person events and our annual conference was cancelled or delayed due to Covid-19. Our members were surveyed regarding their continued preference for online or delayed in-person conference and chose to postpone our annual conference over participating in an online conference.
We hosted an online educational and wellness event for our members which included a talk by one our unlicensed medicines suppliers Medfind on the sourcing of drugs in short supply and we had workshop entitled “Resilience Minds at Work” provided by a psychologist, to support and encourage the wellbeing of our members. The aim for members was to have an understanding of how their mind works, how stress works, the relationship between thoughts and emotional reactions and how to reduce stress.
Uniphar Site Visit – We had a very interesting day visiting the Uniphar Citywest premises which gave members a really good insight into the sourcing and supply of medicines.
NAHPT are now part of an advisory committee for one of the colleges (TU, Dublin) providing a pharmacy technician course, participating in the pharmacy technician studies programme development.
Our committee member and former Nahpt president Laura Lyons was elected secretary of the EAPT (European Association of Pharmacy Technicians) NAHPT committee have provided support and answered regular queries from pharmacy technicians working in hospitals and community pharmacy in relation to pharmacy work practices.
We look forward to another interesting, productive, and progressive year next year for pharmacy technicians.
nahptirl@outlook.com | www.nahpt.ie
Read more clinical features here
Read more of our latest news here