Pharmacy Techs in ED

Our ER pharmacist sometimes fulfills this role. If techs are going to be responsible for doing this for all ED patients, though ... I would take advantage of the opportunity to get this function out of triage.

We have pharm techs in our department and have for a while now. Our techs do medication recs once the patient is placed in a room. It has really assisted in getting appropriate med lists, as they contact the pharmacy (community) and get proper updated lists sent right to us. They also help with some teaching and gopher meds which we may run out of in the dept! We initially had them seeing everyone but found that triage assessing was leading to a waste of resources due to walk outs etc.

Our ED pharmacist only reconciles the medications upon hearing a pt will be admitted. I mean... is reconciling someone's list of 25 meds when they're only a treat 'em and street 'em scenario worthwhile ? Or am I missing something?

Hello,

We're getting ready to implement the use of pharmacy techs in our ED with ALL patients. We already have techs who come in and verify meds on patients being admitted, but we'll soon have techs doing all patient meds. We're having conversations about the best way to have this flow...do the techs come to triage and do it, does the nurse do triage, then tell the tech...We'll only have 2 techs in a 60 bed ED...

So, do any of y'all use pharmacy techs or people to do med recs separate from triage? If so, what is your flow?

JCAHO says med recs need to be done on ALL patients seen in the inpatient or outpatient setting. Sure is expensive to pay a pharmacist to do med recs, I would think you could hire an admit RN to do this.

I would think you could hire an admit RN to do this.

Or a rhesus monkey.