So, of all the professions that are portrayed inaccurately in media, “pharmacy tech” is a… fun one.

Because we mostly don’t even EXIST. When a fictional character gets a medicine, mostly you’ll just see the doctor prescribe it, and then the character just suddenly… has it.

You rarely even see a pharmacy at all, let alone get any clear idea of just what pharmacists and pharmacy technicians actually do, let alone the difference between their roles.

And, whether these fictional portrayals are a cause or a symptom or both– this is a real problem. Because people who see pharmacies as a forgettable and unimportant step in the process are not gonna be prepared for the issues that come up there.

People will say “I found a doctor who’s covered by my insurance” or “I found a doctor who will treat me without insurance” or sometimes even just “I found a doctor who’s willing to treat me for this!”– and while that alone is sometimes a huge battle to win, it’s not over.

People forget that “a doctor treating you” usually means, even in the best case, “a doctor asks you some questions and then writes a prescription, which is just a paper saying you are allowed to use a certain medicine.”

And getting that medicine is an entirely different process, which the doctor very likely knows nothing about.

Including:

I have dealt with prescriptions written by doctors who clearly know few if any of these things.

And not everyone in the pharmacy will know, either! Pharmacy techs these days are trained on the job like retail employees, by their already-busy coworkers… and if you’ve got a tough question about availability or insurance coverage, there may only be one person in the pharmacy who’s ever gotten the chance to learn how to help you with it. Or not even one, sometimes.

(In my experience the pharmacy technicians– the senior ones who’ve been there the longest, not the newbies they’re training– are usually the ones most likely to know how to resolve a problem with insurance coverage.)

(And “been there the longest” really means specifically there, at that exact pharmacy, because things are done very differently in different systems. I’ve entered new jobs with years and years of experience and found myself starting over from pretty much nothing.)

(Pharmacists have the most authority, especially regarding questions about medication itself and how it’s used– but they do not tend to have the most knowledge about how to get it paid for.)

(Technicians may also be the ones with the most knowledge about which meds are in stock and how to order more of them– or that may be a whole different job done by inventory specialists, who the pharmacists and techs may or may not be able to get a hold of to ask. Depends on the pharmacy.)