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Hello,

 I am curious if anyone is utilizing pharmacy technicians to assist with your medication refills?

I am located in Illinois and the pharmacy practice act as seems to limit delegation and oversight from pharmacist to pharmacy tech.

We are exploring adding pharmacy technicians to our team to help complete medication refills and medication prior authorizations and they would report to our triage nurse supervisor. 

Thank you for your time. 

Heather:

Interesting thought, slippery slope.

First, let me express that in general I do not fully understand why/ agree that pharmacy refills are delegated to nursing and not to pharmacy altogether.  (Just one of my  buttons that get pushed....)  Having worked many years with Pharmacists as a Poison Control Specialist, I have found that Pharmacists are always more than willing to cede their authority to others so they can have more expansive roles.

According to pharmacy regulations in most states, pharmacy technicians are under the supervision and control of a licensed pharmacist (or MD), not an RN, and I am of the opinion that this is a situation where the Triage Nurse supervisor may be acting out of scope of her own practice.  (Not unlike medical assistants regulations in most states)  And only Advanced practice nurses have prescribing privileges.

As with medical assistants, pharmacy techs or assistants may be acting out of scope and most certainly in ability to assess patient status and condition in order to verify medication refills.

We do allow unlicensed staff to approve some refill requests.  The only ones they are able to approve are medications that the patient has been on chronically.  We have very specific guidelines on appointment frequency, labwork, etc. that the providers have signed off on in each office for their clinical staff for each type of medication.  If it falls outside of those guidelines its requires the provider to sign off on them.  We also changed our policy on sample medications.  We can not refill sample medications...those have to be a new order each time we distribute a sample.  Also, controlled substances of course have to be ordered by the provider each time...we do not refill those for the providers.  

The RNs and LPNs follow the same process for med refills as our unlicensed staff.  I would think a similar process could be set up for pharmacy techs.

I would love to see your guidelines. We are currently working on a revision for our RN Refill protocol.