Page 12 - Healthcare News Sep/Oct 2022

HEALTHCARE EDUCATION CONT’D Prescription for Success
PD
to the healthcare field —
harmacy Tech Training Program Helps Healthcare Workers Aim for More
By KAILEY HOULE
almary Santiago is not new
she has worked in home health, and her mother is a pharmacist — but
she is rediscovering the importance of her work through a new pharmacy technician training program from which she recently graduated.
“I thought my mom working in the phar- macy was just counting pills and passing them on and making sure that the patients had their meds, and that was about it,”
she said. “Now I go to her and I say, ‘you really worked hard to make sure that your patients were OK and that they understood everything.’
“It’s made me understand that my patients’ medications are very important, and that helps me do my job a lot better, to get my patients to understand that their
“I thought my mom working in the pharmacy was just counting pills and passing them on and making sure that the patients had their meds, and that was about it.”
medications are important to them, too,” Santiago went on. “Without that education, it would be like, ‘OK, you don’t want to take it, you don’t have to. We’re not going to force you.’ But now I understand that, for example, having warfarin or heparin is going to be important for a cardiac patient who needs it for their heart and blood- stream.”
Hokyoke Community College (HCC) has been collaborating with Baystate Health since the spring of 2021 to put together a customized, no-cost pharmacy technician training program for incumbent workers employed at area medical facilities. The program was funded through a Digital In- novation for Lifelong Learning grant HCC
received from the Boston-based Common- wealth Corp.
Twenty individuals employed in various other capacities at Baystate Health and Holyoke Medical Center have completed the pharmacy technician program. The five-month hybrid training program included self-paced academic coursework plus hands-on training in the mock phar- macy and non-sterile and sterile processing labs at Western New England University.
Graduates have gotten the opportunity to expand their learning and career path to become a pharmacy technician, and, like Santiago, have learned that working in a pharmacy is not just counting pills and passing them on to the patient; it’s about growth and support.
Jason Pacheco, director of Workforce Planning and Compensation at Baystate Health, told HCN that his team was able to work with a number of frontline employ- ees and help them align their paths to
this particular training program and then partnered with the pharmacy team at HCC to help develop the program.
“Baystate had put in for an application for the Digital Lifelong Learning program to train pharmacy technicians, and not only to train them, but to develop a competency- based, contextualized course that helped incumbent workers that were on the front lines, or EVS [environmental services] staff or food-service folks, in order to upskill toward a critical occupation for inpatient pharmacy technician,” Pacheco explained.
Jason Pacheco (left) says graduates of the pharmacy technician training program (some of whom are pic- tured above) will be better able to “upskill” to an occupation that needs an influx of talent.
Photos by Chris Yurko
“I think that the HCC team has done a phe- nomenal job really developing and listening and working with Baystate Health and Holyoke Medical Center to really design and develop a program.”
Meeting a Critical Need
Even before the pandemic, staffing short- ages were taking a huge toll on pharmacies, especially those in the retail sector. Phar- macists and technicians were being over- worked due to low numbers of employees, which started creating an environment for medication errors. And with the pandemic shutting the world down in March 2020, the problems just got worse.
Please see Pharmacy, page 26
12 WWW.HEALTHCARENEWS.COM SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022