Technicians Across the World Will Be Celebrating National Pharmacy Technician Day

Q: To start, what is the importance of pharmacy technicians and how are you planning on celebrating National Pharmacy Technician Day?

João José Joaquim: My name is João. I am from Portugal. I am currently president of Portuguese Association of Pharmacy Technicians. I was between 2012 and 2017, the president of European Association of Pharmacy Technicians. We are preparing the National Day of Pharmacy Technician, October 18, and we call our colleagues to present the activities they are preparing the community pharmacies, hospital pharmacies, to share with us through our Facebook and photos of the events to share and make a global perspective of the national day, not only in Portugal, but within the associations in Europe, in all over the world.

We think it's very important to show the profession to the society, to the communities, and also to the other professionals. I think the social way that people have seen is not yet what we want. We are trying to find some opportunities to do that, and I think the national day, it's a great opportunity to do to show the profession to the society.

Samantha Quaye: I'm Sam Quaye. I'm from the UK and I'm a pharmacy technician here. I think the importance of Pharmacy Technician can't really over talk what pharmacy technicians do. Pharmacy technicians take several roles to improve patient safety and in Great Britain, we're a regulated profession and like all health care professionals, such as nurses, radiographers, or indeed, pharmacists. This means that we're accountable for our actions and we adhere to professional standards in the same way that pharmacists do.

We are integral members of the multiprofessional team. Pharmacy technicians add value to clinical technical and operational aspects of patient care.

I'll be celebrating pharmacy technician day with colleagues by getting our communications team to showcase the role of pharmacy technicians putting out social media posts about the value of what we can do and how we can support patients with care within pharmacy. We're also going to have cupcakes for all of our pharmacy technicians within my organization with PTCB Toppers with #RXTechDay, that's how we'll becelebrating.

Tiffany Kofroth: My name is Tiffany Kofroth, I am an advanced pharmacy technician from Houston, Texas, so representing United States. I've been a technician for really longer than I thought I would be in the field, but I absolutely love it. I've been a technician for 24 years, and I'm an educator in pharmacy for pharmacy technicians and pharmacists.

Here, a lot of the similar things, doing social media posts. We do a lot of internal media publications within the hospital, as far as representing our technicians. We have probably over 250 technicians here at the hospital alone. We have a total team of 600+ pharmacists and pharmacy technicians within our institution.

Pharmacy Week for us, as we like to call it, is really a big celebration for us. We do have a lot of giveaways. We do daily prizes. We sometimes do bingo during lunch breaks, so people can win some prizes. We usually do other events throughout the month as well, as far as, wear your favorite sports team shirts to work that day, if there's a sporting event going on. Right now we're in the baseball playoffs, so this Friday, I think we're wearing our favorite MLB team shirt, but then we also do football and things like that. We really tried to make the pharmacy technicians, part of that interdisciplinary team. We want to make sure they're an integral part, especially here at the institution, not only in pharmacy but in the health care team as well. That's what we do here at MD Anderson in Houston Texas.