All That Glitters Is Not Gold...

And all who has a university degree is not intelligent. Yes, I can hear snickerings in the background, "You mean it took you this long to realise?" Not that I did not realise this sooner, just that the feeling is more acute these past couple of weeks.

Tis the season to train pharmacists who just graduated from university again. Somehow every year you see some really ridiculous people who managed to graduate from pharmacy school. Just the week before last, I had one pre-reg pharmacist who interrupted me while I was half-way dispensing. She humbly asked me if there was any technique to pouring syrups from the stock bottle into the amber bottles for patients because she was spilling almost half the syrup from the stock bottle instead of getting them into the amber bottle. I'll be frank, I was stunned. I did not know of any special techniques when it comes to pouring syrups; you just pour. I mean, come on, when we were pharmacy students there were plenty of lab lessons for you to pour things into small test tubes, and into cylinders. Please do not tell me those were not enough training. Either she is a total klutz, or she had been lazy and asked her lab partner to run all the experiments while all she did was to take the results.

Then there was another pre-reg pharmacist who did something which did not make much sense to us. We were suppose to dispense 315ml of SV syrup to a patient. Commonsense says since a full bottle is 300ml, I will just dispense 1 full bottle and pour out another 15ml from the stock bottle for the patient. Not pour 1 full bottle + 15 ml all into another big bottle.

Then there was the incident when she processed the order "to take half tablet in the morning and 1 tablet at night" into 2 separate instructions then packed 2 packets of medicine, one for each instruction. End result, when I was dispensing the medicine, I was shocked to find one packet that said, "Take half a tablet in the morning," and another that said, "Take 1 tablet at night." When I questioned her rationale for processing in this manner, her answer was that was how the computer translated the electronic order from the doctor. The computer program runs on a translation algorithm that is sometimes not very smart, but we can override the faulty translation by manually keying in the order. I do expect that much of a person who graduated with a university degree, and had already been briefed on how to manually key in prescription orders.

Next is somebody I know who is doing a part-time degree in some engineering course. When the doctor ordered a "nice" dose which either happens to be half or a quarter tablet, you just process as that. Why add additional stupid instructions such as crush half a tablet in 10ml water and take 10ml? Why ask if we should give the syrup formulation when we do not have the stocks because the drug company is having problems with their production? Just ask the parents to crush and dissolve the tablets and give the required quantity... When such things happen, I wonder how on earth you get entry to do a part-time degree.

In fact I wonder if all these so-called part-time degrees should be recognised as degrees. There are many part-time degrees out there that allow people to spend the same number of years as those doing full-time degrees to get that coveted piece of paper, yet the hours they actually spend on the course work is much less that those doing a full-time degree. So either the part-time degrees are sub-standard, or full-time degrees are asking the students to do a lot redundant stuffs. You think about it.