Day 4: Pediatric Pharmacy

Sorry I've gotten behind, I am determined to document this whole month!

I was in the pediatric satellite pharmacy today, and shadowed the pharmacist. What's different about a pediatric pharmacy is that 90% of all the medicines are in liquid formulation. Very different from what I'm used to at CVS!

One of the challenges of pediatrics is that some drugs may not have a liquid formulation. There was an example of one while I was there with phenoxybenzamine. We talked to the Special Formulations pharmacy to see if they would be able to create a new recipe in house.

The pharmacist and I took a walk up to the floor to talk to the nurse taking care of the patient to let them know it would be a few hours for Special Formulations to get the medicine prepared. The nurse said that was fine, and that during rounds it was inquired the onset of action of the medicine, and I looked it up. This was my first experience communication drug information to part of the health care team (that wasn't another pharmacist).

It took some thought to figure out how to convert "The half life of the drug is 24 hours because it is partially excreted in the bile and therefore is subject to enterohepatic recycling" to "The half life of the drug is 24 hours because it gets reabsorbed, so it stays in the patient's system longer".

For tomorrow: Surgical Services Pharmacy