062

The pharmacy was quite pleasant last Thursday and I had a very enjoyable and productive day. Gregg's task for me that day was to go through all the OTC aisles and write down every product I would recommend for certain disease states. It nearly took the entire day and I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of OTC and homeopathic remedies available. But it was definitely good to go through these products and now I can recommend ANY OTC! BUAHAHAH. I just need to go over the consultations and review their active ingredients...boo.

Back at school, I am taking an independent elective course that our group has lovingly called P.R.O.V.E: Pacific Rx Outreach Video Education (or something like that, we honestly just wanted a cool sounding acronym and everything else fell into place). The premise of the elective is to create patient education videos on drugs for certain disease states in a way that makes medical jargon make sense and show how your pharmacist is an awesome resource! Most importantly, we want to make these videos accessible to our patients who may not have the best health literacy so we plan on translating them in a variety of languages and focusing the videos on certain ethnic populations by incorporating familiar cultural aspects into our projects. ANYWAY, our first disease state we're tackling is diabetes and my job is the illustrator and finding information on glucose meters and test strips. So now this is where I tie in all the stuff I have been researching into the pharmacy setting...

The highlight of my most recent visit to the pharmacy was when I had finally reached the pharmacy counter to look up the diabetic meters and test strips. One of the techs was helping a customer in finding a lancet but instead, she was holding a glucose meter. She saw me, gave me a look of desperation, and left me there holding the glucose meter, my notebook, and a blank stare from the customer. In my head I was thinking, "Now is the the time to P.R.O.V.E my knowledge of diabetic devices!!!" Sure enough I explained to the patient what she was looking for and pointed her to the correct product. I felt like I was spewing rainbows because I was so glad to put my knowledge to use.

Bottom line: It feels good to help people.