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Certified Pharmacy Technician
Explore the lessons in Medications. Start with a lesson and review the key ideas. Use lesson questions when available.
14 lessons · Reading progress is separate from quiz results.
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A medicine bottle can show several names. One is the actual chemical that does the work. One is the product's marketed name. One describes the family the medicine belongs to. A technician who mixes these up can miss that two "different" products contain the same drug, or assume two products are interchangeable when they are not.
About 21 minutes
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Open lesson →Many heart and circulation medicines share a goal, such as lowering blood pressure. They often reach that goal in different ways. As a pharmacy technician, you need to know three things about each medicine: what it is called, which group it belongs to, and what it is used for. You also need to recognize when a shared goal does not make two medicines interchangeable, and when a patient's report about bleeding needs the pharmacist right away.
About 21 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →Diabetes medicines and thyroid medicines can look similar at the pharmacy counter. Both are usually taken every day, refilled for a long time, and named on labels you will see often. They do very different jobs, though.
About 27 minutes
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Open lesson →A medicine name tells you only part of what you are handling. To fill a prescription safely, you also need to know three more things: what job the medicine does in the body, which problem it is meant for, and which physical product (inhaler, liquid, capsule) is in your hand. This lesson builds that habit with three common medicines: albuterol for breathing, amoxicillin for bacterial infection, and omeprazole for stomach acid.
About 26 minutes
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Open lesson →A pharmacy technician sees two kinds of information about every medicine. The first is what the medicine is: its name, its class and what it is commonly used for. The second is what happened when a real person took it: "it made me sleepy," "I broke out in hives," "I'm allergic to that."
About 24 minutes
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Open lesson →A prescription can be correct on its own and still cause a problem next to something else the patient uses. A second product may contain the same ingredient. A second medicine may be ordered for the same purpose. A supplement, food, health condition or lab test may change what a medicine does, or what a result means.
About 24 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →A medicine name tells you which drug is involved. It does not tell you what the product is, where it goes in the body, how much drug each unit contains, or how fast the drug is released. Those four facts decide how the product must be handled. A pharmacy technician needs to keep them separate, because a product can match on one and differ on another.
About 25 minutes
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Open lesson →A medicine's dates and storage instructions work like a guarantee with conditions. The manufacturer has shown that the product stays acceptable for a certain time, but only if it is kept the way the label says and its container stays as supplied. Change the conditions by opening, mixing, repackaging, or letting it get too warm or too cold, and the original promise may no longer apply.
About 24 minutes
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Open lesson →Five common medicines in this lesson protect the heart and blood vessels in three different ways:
About 21 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name, Recognize when the pharmacist must intervene. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →Five medicines in this lesson come up often in pharmacy work: apixaban, rosuvastatin, glipizide, empagliflozin and semaglutide. The class a medicine belongs to tells you what it changes in the body. What it changes explains why it is prescribed and many of its warnings.
About 29 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name, Recognize when the pharmacist must intervene. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →Some breathing medicines prevent trouble before it starts. Others stop trouble that has already started. An antibiotic does something different again: it treats an infection caused by bacteria. Much of a pharmacy technician's safety work is noticing when someone treats one kind of medicine as if it were another.
About 29 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name, Recognize when the pharmacist must intervene. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →A pharmacy shelf can hold two medicines that both "fight infection" but cannot replace each other. It can also hold two products with the same active ingredient that must be handled differently. This lesson gives you a way to sort five common medicines. For each one you ask three questions: What does it act on? What exact product is this? What instructions travel with that product?
About 25 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name, Recognize when the pharmacist must intervene. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →Five common antidepressants can all appear on prescriptions for depression. They are still not the same medicine. Each has its own active ingredient, brand associations, class, other uses, dosage forms and warnings. A pharmacy technician's job is to recognize those differences and make sure none of them get lost between the prescription, the computer entry, the shelf and the pharmacist.
About 19 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name, Recognize when the pharmacist must intervene. Suggestions, not required steps.
Open lesson →A medicine's name tells you what the product is. It does not tell you why this patient takes it. In this lesson you learn five medicines well enough to recognize them. You also learn to ask two questions that keep a pharmacy safe: What job is this medicine doing? and What exact product is this?
About 26 minutes
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Recommended first: Read a medicine identity before learning a name, Recognize when the pharmacist must intervene. Suggestions, not required steps.
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