In a curriculum change that faculty described as long overdue, pharmacy schools announced Thursday that they will add a required laboratory course in fixing the pharmacy printer, after site visits found that most of a pharmacist's day is spent clearing label jams and swapping toner.
The new course, PHRD 517: Pharmacy Printer Repair, will be a core competency for graduation, alongside therapeutics and pharmacy law. Students will not advance to rotations until they can clear a jammed label printer, reseat a ribbon, and reprint a vial label without exposing a previous patient's information.
"We went into pharmacies expecting to observe counseling, drug utilization review, and verification," said Dr. Helen Kranz, dean of the Midcontinental College of Pharmacy and chair of the curriculum task force. "What we observed, for hours at a time, was a licensed professional on one knee behind the counter, easing a wrinkled label off a roller and hoping the next one would print straight."
A task force report, based on 180 site visits, estimated that pharmacists devoted 4.7 hours of an average shift to printer-related work and 1.1 hours to clinical review. The most common incidents were labels wrapped around the platen, leaflets that printed blank because the paper had been loaded upside down, and faded barcodes that would not scan at the register.
The laboratory will be graded on practical stations. In one, the label stock has telescoped into the printer during a simulated rush. In another, the auxiliary warning-label printer is out of toner, and a technician is waiting on stickers that read "Take with Food" and "For the Eye." Students who suggest restarting the pharmacy computer will be marked incorrect and asked to return to the printer.
"The computer is almost never the problem," said Darnell Hughes, a laboratory instructor and former community pharmacy manager. "The problem is the printer. If you yank the label stock, you will tear it, and then you have a privacy issue on a half-printed label and a machine that is still jammed. We will teach this until it is muscle memory."
"I have a doctorate, a residency, and a board certification," said Priya Nandakumar, a staff pharmacist. "I have never been asked on the job to recall a kinetic parameter as quickly as I have been asked to get the labels printing again."
The final practical will simulate a Friday afternoon: the vial-label printer is jammed, the leaflet printer is out of toner, and a patient is at the window.
At press time, the first laboratory session had been postponed. Officials said the classroom printer had jammed, and the only faculty member certified to clear it was at another campus, waiting on a toner shipment.
