To celebrate American Pharmacists Month, Pharmacy Times interviewed LaTasha Mitchell, CPhT, System Pharmacy Technician Lead, Professional Development and Education, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), and Quinton Irick, MHA CPhT, System Pharmacy Technician Manager, Operations, MUSC, who described their career journeys and how they become involved in pharmacy. Both technicians shared their experiences celebrating a “Pharmacy Week” at MUSC, complete with games, prizes, and theme days which help bring the community together. Mitchell and Irick also discussed the value of recognizing hard work and encouraging others on the pharmacy team.
Pharmacy Times: Can you introduce yourselves and discuss how you got into pharmacy?
LaTasha Mitchell, CPhT: Hi, my name is LaTasha Mitchell. I am a lead technician here at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) here in Charleston, and I have been with our entity for 23 years.
Quinton Irick, MHA CPhT: And my name is Quinton Irick, my title at MUSC is system pharmacy technician manager. I primarily focus on pharmacy technician retention and recruitment, and I have been at MUSC for a total of 16 years and around 3 months.
I started out working operations like a traditional technician on the on the retail side, then I started working inpatient at MUSC. I've held a few different roles. I served as a pharmacy informatics analyst for a few months, then I transitioned into a Willow analyst. So we implemented our Epic inpatient modules back in 2014, so I was the Willow analyst for a few months before transitioning into an instructional designer role. I then later transitioned into a clinical analyst, where I've served in that role for a few months. I was a contractor for a year, transitioned back in MUSC after leaving for a year, where I was a senior systems educator. So, not only did I educate staff on the Epic Willow the pharmacy platform, but I also educated ambulatory, oncology, and transplant as well, so a multitude of nurses and providers and ancillary roles. And then, I was a department quality and safety manager for around 2 years where I worked with risk managemen. When regulatory writers came on-site, like Joint Commission, I walked around with surveyors, improved projects around safety events...
...and then full circle, back in this role, where I'm a total advocate for the technician role. Again, I focus on retention and recruitment, around strategies, around retaining technicians. As you know, we have shortages, so [I'm] working on recruitment and onboarding strategies as well, working closely with Tasha and her group around training, 30-60-90 [plans], onboarding, and a multitude of different strategies and new initiatives that we're trying to do in the MUSC health system to better [our] technician workforce.
Mitchell: I started here at MUSC out of a tech program, a local tech program here in Charleston, I was hired on as an inpatient technician, so, I worked in the inpatient adult pharmacy for about a year or so, and then I ventured out into the ambulatory space where I worked outpatient pharmacy, it was like a community pharmacy setting. And eventually, we started a pilot program for prior authorization—that was probably [around] 15 years ago—and we quickly realized that it needed more love and attention, so I was a prior auth[orization] tech for a little while. We did a pilot with our transplant clinic and our rheumatology clinic and anything that was filled in our retail space, and it quickly grew like wildfire. So we became not only the prior auth team, but we had one other tech that did prior auth and a few other technicians that did medication assistance, so that went really long, hard, and strong for a while. And then, we ventured into the specialty pharmacy space, which is where I was before I came in this role, I was a tech specialist. I worked with various specialty clinics like sickle cell and also rheumatology for a little while, and that was about 5 years before I came into this role...our education team consists of 2 pharmacists and 1 technician—myself—and we are responsible for the education, for our system, for pharmacists, and technicians. And we work closely—like Quinton said—with him as well, because him and I focus on anything involving our technicians. So this how I got to where I am now.
Irick: How I got into the pharmaceutical space...I graduated high school, so I was a grocery associate at Kmart while going to a technical college as well as I detailed cars at a local Honda dealership. So, I'm going way back. As all of us may know, Kmart no longer exists across the pharmacy. So, Kmart had a had a retail pharmacy within the store, and it sparked some interest. I was taking technical classes, I tried it, and I did not know exactly what I wanted to do. After deciding to jump into pharmacy, I enrolled in a technician program at Trident [Technical College, which was] the same program that Tasha graduated from. We both were enrolled in that program, had a great instructor named Karen Snipe. She was awesome and that's how I got started. Again, I started working out in the retail space, and then decided I wanted to go to the inpatient route, at the time, to go from retail to inpatient there was more money involved in transitioning to the inpatient side versus being a retail technician. So, that's how I got started on the hospital side of pharmacy, versus the retail side.
Pharmacy Times: In your opinion, what is the most rewarding part about being a pharmacy technician?
Mitchell: In my role now, we're responsible for education, so I do like to see, not only in the pharmacy setting itself—whether it be retail, clinical, inpatient—I like to see the bottom line that our patient is satisfied and they've gotten what they need. But also, I think as a pharmacy team, I like to see everybody team up and work together. So, it's not just my pharmacy work [and] my task, and that's your task and your work, I feel like it's pharmacy work, like Quinton would say, we usually use that term with our technicians. It’s a lot, it’s pharmacy work. So, I think when the team is cohesive and everybody is working together...not every day is going to be harmony because you're dealing with human beings, everybody has different personalities and they have different things that they bring to the workspace. But I think the most rewarding thing is when you're able to, even if there is a hiccup, you can move past that and you can work as a team to get things done [and] accomplished for your space. I think that's the best reward, is making sure that you're staying at the standard that you're supposed to be at, as well as always evolving and elevating. And also, encouraging others to go up as well as yourself is always a plus, and I like to see everybody be successful.
Pharmacy Times: How are you celebrating Pharmacy Technician Day, and how would you encourage others to celebrate?
Key Takeaways
- Diverse Pharmacy Technician Roles: Both LaTasha Mitchell and Quinton Irick have held various roles in pharmacy throughout their careers. Their journeys include transitioning from retail and inpatient settings to specialized roles in education, recruitment, and informatics, highlighting the diverse career paths available for pharmacy technicians within the health care system.
- Collaboration and Teamwork: Mitchell emphasizes the importance of teamwork in the pharmacy setting, noting that the most rewarding aspect of her job is seeing the team work cohesively toward a common goal. She highlights the value of collaboration and encourages fostering a supportive environment where everyone can grow and succeed.
- Celebrating Pharmacy Technicians: At MUSC, Pharmacy Week and Technician Day are celebrated with events such as games, prizes, and recognition programs. Both Irick and Mitchell stress the importance of recognizing the hard work of pharmacy technicians and teammates, whether through formal recognition or simple verbal appreciation, because it helps contribute positive to morale and retention.
Irick: Yes, I think one of the biggest things that we do is we have a huge Pharmacy Week, and we have a technician day specifically [as well]. At MUSC, we offer games, prizes, we try to be more like collaborative. We're a large health system, we have over 16 hospitals, and our technician number is around 280 plus, so we try to get everyone to be as involved as possible and It's kind of hard to do when there's 3-hour [time] differences between some of our facilities, but we do try to encourage those to join in on the festivities that we have for that particular day, and a lot of things that we have during the week. We send out lunches. We have—again—we have multiple prize, we play games, we're trying to be more innovative and creative with the games that we offer [by] utilizing more of a virtual platform to do those because, again, everyone's in a separate place. We have different modules...at MUSC, we have an option called “Celebrate,” and that's just a platform that we use to recognize staff. So, when big things come up, we use that “Celebrate” option at our organization to recognize the staff members for the good work that they do, good catches that they perform, how they've assisted care team members, how they assisted patients, those types of things.
I would just encourage others to do something similar. It doesn't take much, at MUSC, we actually have what we call "standard views," which is a retention strategy, to kind of kind of understand the cultures and the environments that our technicians and our pharmacy staff members work in. And it's the way to kind of understand what's going on. So, encouraging folks to just do good work, recognizing when staff does good work, a part of data just came back around recognition, “how would you like to be recognized?” And it was just simple as stating that they did a good job, whether that be informal, whether that be within a group, or just 1-on-1, I think the recognition itself could be lacking in most spaces, and I would just encourage just to continue that recognition. [It] doesn't have to be tangible, [it] could just be verbal or a pat on the back. It goes a very long way.
Mitchell: Yeah, for our Pharmacy Week, it's pretty big, and I think a lot of times you see people's creativity. We offer a lot of things also around themed events [for example,] and I think people really get all into that. And we have magnificent pictures that come from different areas, and you just get to see the creativity of different people around you. So, it also gives us the opportunity to explore other things besides just our everyday "work." But we have a great time here, and I like that about our space.
