Pharmacy is the third largest healthcare profession and pharmacist play a critical role by offering information and advice to help patients successfully manage their medication therapy. The roles of pharmacist generally fall into drug delivery and medication safety, patient education and advocacy, drug therapy monitoring, and research and clinical studies.
Job opportunities for pharmacy professionals are quite good and pharmacist jobs can be found in various settings including hospitals, long-term care facilities, home health centers, clinics and retail pharmacies located across the United States. While pharmacy jobs usually come with long working hours, the salary enumerations are very good. This coupled with the good job prospects have led to an increase in people enrolling in academic programs to become a pharmacist.
Pharmacists work closely with pharmacy technicians and pharmacy aides. While pharmacy technicians assist pharmacists to provide medication and other health services to patients, pharmacy aides would assist with the administrative running of a pharmacy.
Most pharmacy technician jobs and pharmacy aide jobs are located within retail pharmacies, and the hours tend to be the same as pharmacist. Job outlook for both is very good, with employment expected to grow faster than that of the average career. While there is legislature restricting the number of pharmacy technicians per pharmacist, an increasing number of pharmacy technician are more involved in medication dispensing while the pharmacist concentrates patient care. This might lead to a change in the employment law and thus bring about more pharmacy technician jobs.
