Pharmacy Technician Penn Foster Career School Online

Overview

Penn Foster Career School is a great choice to make because this school allows you to get your pharmacy technician qualification from the comfort of your own home, something that cannot be said for many pharmacy technician training programs. With a qualification form Penn Foster you will be guaranteed the chance of being a valuable part on the medical team of one of the following businesses:

• Retail pharmacies
• Local druggists
• Grocery stores
• Hospitals

The Penn Foster Program will teach you:

• Medical terminology
• How to manage and update patient records
• Office procedures

The Penn Foster Career School program can help you learn these skills and many more affordably, quickly and conveniently. There are a number of interesting courses that you will learn through this online program. You will learn, to start off with, the procedures that surround receiving prescriptions from doctors and hospitals. You will also learn the all important skill of how to prepare prescriptions for patients. The last two things that the pharmacy technician Penn Foster Career School online course will teach you is how to verify insurance and prescription information, and how to assist the pharmacist with everyday duties (which will be one of your main roles as a pharmacy technician).

There are many advantages to the Penn Foster program. It is:

• Flexible: this means that you will have freedom with your schedule. You can, for example, study in the evenings after your children are in bed, or on weekends when you are not working. In that way you will be able to earn your qualification regardless of the other commitments that you may have.

• Convenient: you will not have to go into school in order to study as everything can be done conveniently form the comfort of your very own living room, or anywhere else that you happen to have access to a computer and the internet.

• Self-paced: you will be able to work at the speed that suits you best and you will neither be held back by classmates nor forced to work at a pace that is too fast for you.

Penn Foster is also respected and accredited. The Pharmacy Technician Career Diploma that you earn will be regionally and nationally accredited. This is very important because of the program is not accredited your qualification will count for less and you may effectively be wasting your time as well as your money. The school will equip you to write and pass the PTCB (Pharmacy Technician Certification Board) examination, and you will also be provided with a number of essential and invaluable study materials to help you get through this all important certification exam.

Coursework

Through this program you will receive 10 separate instruction sets that will allow you to work through the various coursework that you need to cover in order to become a pharmacy technician:

Instruction Set 1

This is the most basic starting point that provides you with an overview of the profession as well as giving you some tip on how to learn. The topics include:

• Learning Strategies
• The Profession of Pharmacy

Instruction Set 2

This section in quite heavy on laws and regulations and introduces the idea of vets as prescribers. The topics include:

• Regulations for Drug Development
• Pharmacy Operations
• Prescribers of Drugs
• Veterinarians as Prescribers

Instruction Set 3

This has a lot to do with the paperwork and admin, such as how to label the various prescriptions that you fill accurately. The topics include:

• Drug Information Sources
• Drug Manufacturers, Monographs, and Package Inserts
• Label Preparation
• Dosage Forms and Routes of Administration
• Prescriptions

Instruction Set 4

You will have to do calculations as a pharmacy technician, so math is needed. The topics include:

• Pre-Algebra
• Pharmacy Arithmetic
• Pharmaceutical Calculations

Instruction Set 5

This is the most important section as it will make up the majority of what you will actually be doing once you qualify as a pharmacy technician. The topics include:

• Pharmaceutical Dispensing 1: General Considerations
• Pharmaceutical Dispensing 2: Solid Dose Forms
• Pharmaceutical Dispensing 3: Liquid Dose Forms – Oral
• Pharmaceutical Dispensing 4: Topical Dose Forms
• Pharmaceutical Dispensing 5: Miscellaneous Dose Forms
• Equipment

Instruction Set 6

Of course there are a number of things that can go wrong in terms of drugs and you need to know how to avoid these situations and perhaps how to identify them as well. The topics include:

• How Drugs Work
• Poison/Drug Emergencies
• Addictive Drugs
• Adverse Reactions/Drug Interactions
• Basic Chemistry of Drug Molecules

Instruction Set 7

Compounding refers to putting medications together from their base forms. The topics include:

• Compounding of Sterile Products 1
• Compounding of Sterile Products 2

Instruction Set 8

There is a lot of terminology specific to the healthcare arena that you will need to learn. The topics include:

• Medical Terminology
• Anatomy/Physiology

Instruction Set 9

There are different kinds of drugs that you will be required to identify. The topics include:

• Drug Classes: Prescription Drugs
• Drug Classes: Over-the-Counter Drugs

Instruction Set 10

The topics include:

• General Medical Conditions
• Infectious Diseases
• Cancer

Tuition And Financing

There are a number of pricing benefits offered by Penn Foster’s pharmacy technician program. For example if you enroll immediately you will be charged $1 less. There is a monthly payments option which could as low as $33 as well as free shipping and handling. Books and learning aids are included in the overall price and you will receive the free CareerBuilder® Career Services (which is about $130 in value). Last but not least you get all of this plus world-class faculty and instructional support.

There are several payment plans that you can choose from when looking at how you are going to pay for your pharmacy technician training. These are:

• The Full Payment Plan – Total Price: $422 (which means you save $123)
• The Automatic Payment Plan – Total price: $465 (which means you save $80)
• The Mail Payment Plan – Total price: $545

There are a number of different payment methods that you can use to pay for your tuition at Penn Foster Career College and these are:

• Visa
• MasterCard
• American Express
• Discover
• Checks
• Money orders
• Authorized automatic withdrawals from checking and savings accounts from U.S. banks

According to the school’s website, “Many Penn Foster programs are approved for U.S. Armed Forces veteran’s education benefits. Reservists may also qualify for veterans education benefits. Check your local or regional VA office for eligibility requirements.”

As you can see the rated are substantially cheaper than those that you may have discovered when looking into other schools, both online and face to face options. There are not a lot of financial aid options offered by the school itself but remember that you can apply to governmental and nongovernmental sources for financial aid in the form of scholarships, loans, and grants, all of which can be very helpful in helping you get through your program. However if you have time to save you may be able to cover the costs of the program without going the route of getting financial aid at all. This would, naturally, be the best option as you will not be in debt and you will not owe anybody anything in order to complete your training. However there is no shame in getting financial aid and if that is what you have to do, do it. Just make sure that you are aware of all of the requirements and stipulations that come with the aid and that you will be able to repay the loans and fulfill other requirements once your training is complete.

Becoming a pharmacy technician is easier than you think, especially with the pharmacy technician Penn Foster Career School online course discussed here. As long as you meet the requirements that are specified you will be able to become a pharmacy technician online easily. Remember that the medical profession is one that is ever expanding and that will always be necessary. So a career in this domain will ensure that you have the best job security possible as well as continual source of employment from a variety of different sectors. Penn Foster is a great option to go with if you plan to study online.