Exit Interview

(1) What is your essential question and answers? My essential question is "What is the best way to run a profitable retail pharmacy?"  My answers are:
 - The pharmacist should make sure patients understand their prescriptions.
- The pharmacist should ensure profit off of each prescription he sales.
- Hiring a pharmacist lab technician to improve efficiency 
        My best answer would be my first answer. Through this, the patient care that each patient should recieve is handled better. The patient fulfills their prescription regiment which entails that more profit can be made off of each prescription distributed. This is the easiest and most effictive to ensuring profit in a retail pharmacy. 

2.  The process that I took to get to this answer would be mentoring at my pharmacy to see what was being done there to keep patients coming back and the establishment open. I wanted to take note of each step that was being taken to ensure that the patients were being handled properly with patient care and financial aspects  were being handled. I also researched through different pharmaceutical companies to see what prescriptions were being sold at and how the pharmacist could make more money off of selling them.

3. The only problems that I faced while trying to find an answer to my essential questions were how I was going to handle many patients that didn't really want to communicate with me and give me specific answers to why they kept coming back to this pharmacy. I resolved it by finding my answers in the conversations that my mentor was having with the patients to see what she was doing and also what steps were being taken with each patient. 

4. My two greatest sources that helped me answer my essential question were my mentor, Grace Lin and my book, "The pharmaceutical Industry" by Roman Espejo. Grace Lin was a great help in finding the answers for my essential question because she let me observe the steps that she was taking to keep her establishment afloat. Also the steps that were being taken to ensure that patients were being handled safely and efficiently to keep them coming back. My book was a great help because it defined the aspects of the pharmaceutical industry that I needed to see to understand how profit was being made and also how to make it while being a pharmacist. 

Independent Component 2

LITERAL

(a) “I, Ralph Hernandez, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.”

(b) Pharmacist Grace Lin, 
(c) done
(d) While I was doing my Independant Component 2, I was basically put in charge of dealing with all only spanish speaking patients. Since I hardly knew the language that well myself, it was quite the challenge. I would make sure that the patient would understand how much they were paying for certain items and what Grace, me mentor, had to tell them. My mentor would make sure that they knew what times and how often to take the medication no matter how long it took with the patient. Sometimes this caused things to get busy with patients and I was really rushed to make sure they didn't wait too long for their medications. 

INTERPRETIVE 

These are pictures of when I had to change the prescription filing system that my mentor has at the pharmacy & ran the register for when patients came into the store. I changed the color pin on the bags to let the pharmacist know how long the prescriptions had been waiting there so she could know when to alert the patient. 

Applied

This component has really showed me the signifance of having a pharmacist lab technician who helps when things get busy around the pharmacy. This has helped me understand my next answer to my essential question. Which would be adding a pharmacist lab tech to the pharmaceutical team for patients. I also felt like I made an impact on the community with the hours of work I put in. I was able to help many families who couldn't speak english get their medications more easily than they previously would have.