CPhTs to Play a Vital Role This Flu Season

Kristina Michel - noemail@pharmacytechnician.org — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:00:00 GMT

If flu vaccines have not reached your pharmacy for the 2010-2011 flu season, they soon will, and certified pharmacy technicians will be playing a vital role in ensuring that customers are immunized at retail and community pharmacies across the country.

CPhTs will be working with pharmacists to keep operations running smoothly in the pharmacy and help ensure that pharmacists have plenty of time to work directly with patients. Last year, pharmacy retail chain Walgreens successfully immunized over 7.4 million patients against H1N1 flu and seasonal flu, an accomplishment that Dan Luce, R.Ph., MBA, the director of pharmacy affairs for Walgreens, believes would not have happened without the support of their pharmacy technicians.

“(Certified pharmacy technicians) at Walgreens are essential to maintaining pharmacy operations and making sure the pharmacists have the support to give the immunizations,” Luce said in a news release by the PTCB. “The involvement of CPhTs is critical to our campaign’s success.”

The 2010-11 flu season promises to be a season of firsts for patients and health care professionals. For the first time, the seasonal flu vaccine will contain a strain of the H1N1 swine flu, so patients will no longer have to take the seasonal flu and the H1N1 flu vaccine separately. This is also the first flu season that will fall under the new guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The guidelines, released back in February, recommend that everyone over six months of age be vaccinated against the flu. In previous years, the CDC only recommended that children, seniors and immune-compromised patients at high risk of suffering medical complications from infection be routinely vaccinated.The CDC also recommends that children between six months and nine years of age receive two doses of flu vaccine separated by at least four weeks.

In addition to the H1N1 flu virus, the new vaccines will protect against H3N2 influenza A and influenza B. CDC reported that over 12 percent of Americans said they received their immunizations from a pharmacy or a drugstore in the 2009-10 flu season. The World Health Organization declared an end to the H1N1 flu pandemic on August 10.

24-Aug-10 1:00 PM

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CPhTs to Play a Vital Role This Flu Season