Pharmacy Technician University

Since January 1, 2010 the State of Florida has new, more stringent, criteria each potential Pharmacy Technician must meet.

First, you must register with the State of Florida Board of Pharmacy. When you register as a new applicant you must submit proof of meeting one of the three criteria below:

1. You must have completed a board-approved Pharmacy Technician Training Program. Student technicians must complete a 160 hour training course within a six month period.
2. Have completed at least 1,500 hours of Pharmacy Technician work experience under the supervision of a licensed pharmacist
3. Received a certification from any agency accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies. This also includes the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board and the Institute for the Certification of Pharmacy Technicians.

Cost:

If you want to register as a Pharmacy Technician in Florida you must submit an application and a fee of $105 to the Board of Pharmacy. There’s an application fee of $50, initial registration fee of $50 and an unlicensed activity fee of $5. The $50 application fee is non-refundable.

Time to Approval:

Assuming you’ve met the requirements put forth by the board applications for registration are reviewed within 30 days.

License Renewal:

Once registered a Pharmacy Technician must submit a $55 biennial (every two years) renewal fee along with proof of completing your continuing education requirements.

At the time of this writing the CE requirements are as follows:

A registered Pharmacy Technician must obtain a minimum of 12 contact hours of CE. Two (2) of those hours must be from a “live” presentation and 2 hours must be dedicated to the prevention of medication hours. Also, 1 hour must be dedicated to HIV/AIDS education. The HIV/AIDS requirement is only for the first renewal if you are licensed more than 12 months before your license expires. If you are licensed less than 12 months than the 1 contact hour can be in the prevention of HIV/AIDS. All CE credits must be approved by the ACPE or Florida Board of Pharmacy.

Special Certification Requirements for Florida:

Please note, in Florida you are required to register with the state and meet the requirements of the state. However, the State of Florida has no special certification exam. They only register technicians.

License Transfer:

If you have been licensed in another state and would like to transfer, or reciprocate, your license to Florida the same requirements for a new licensee stands. If you were required to take a Pharmacy Technician Program in your old state which was also approved by the Florida Board of Pharmacy. If it was not, you will be required to take a Florida Board-approved course.

More information:

Online applications and more information are available via the Florida Board of Pharmacy. They can also be reached offline at:

Medical Quality Assurance/Licensure Information
4052 Bald Cypress Way, Bin #C01
Tallahassee, FL 32399-3251
Phone: 850-488-0595
Fax: 850-487-9626

There’s no doubt about it. In my time training people to be pharmacy techs THE biggest stumbling block was calculations. If you are in that boat then I think you’ll appreciate the next set of ‘tutorials’ on this site where I’ll be working through some basic calculation issues.

My original intent was to work through these problems using a video camera and me working them out on paper. I’m still going to do that. But, for the time being I’m just going to put some basic problems in a text format so at least you can get started with them.

Let me point out one thing. This is a ‘rule’ I taught all my techs and it seemed to help them. It’s this: when you are working a problem and you are stuck, it’s probably because you don’t know what you are solving for.

In short, START WITH THE END IN MIND.

Here’s today’s example to drive the point home.

Let’s say you get this prescription:

Amoxicillin 125mg/5ml
sig: ss tsp tid x 10days

But, we have a problem in the pharmacy: for some reason ‘someone‘ forgot to order the 125mg strength. So, we’re left with the 250mg/5ml strength in 100ml bottles. You, as the tech taking the prescription, should be able to solve for this and figure out how much to dispense and get it down the line.

Granted, for someone experienced reading this is NOT a difficult problem. For others, they see that they have to use a different strength and get twitterpated and can’t get going.

Remember, start with the end in mind and solve for that.

So, what do we want to know? We want to know how much of the available drug (both directions and quantity) to give to the patient.

You can solve for this a couple of different ways. But here is how I’d recommend you tackle something like this. First of all, figure out how many mg the doctor wants the patient to be taking with each dose.

We already have the directions: the patient is to take ss tsp tid of the 125mg/5ml strength. SS is 1/2 and tsp is teaspoonful. A teaspoonful is 5ml. So, the patient should get 2.5 ml of the 125mg/5ml strength three times daily.

That means the patient should be taking 75mg (125mg/5ml and they need 2.5 ml=75mg) three times a day (tid).

Now, it’s simply a matter of converting using the 250mg/5ml strength.

So…

We now want to know how many ml in each dose. That’s what we want to solve for. To do that we can set up a ratio, which is a little hard to show here and frankly, not needed. Instead, take the amount of mg/ml of our current strength. So, if we have a bottle with 250mg/5ml that means there are 50mg/ml (250mg divided by 5ml).

If each ml of amoxicillin has 50mg then to get our 75mg dose that we solved for above we simply need 1.5ml three times daily of our new strength.

Again, I will be putting video’s up in the future. But hopefully this short article give you a little feel for my thought process in solving calculations. Granted, there are other ways but it’s helpful to start with the end in mind.