Pharmacist
Melody Eppley, PharmD > Wilson Memorial Hospital
By KEN MOSIER
For What2Be
Melody Eppley got her start as a pharmacist because of one simple reason.
“I needed a job and they had an opening as a (technician) in a pharmacy department,” she said.
The fact that it was in a medical field was even better.
“I always wanted to wear a white coat,” she quipped.
Under current Ohio law, there is no educational requirement to become a pharmacy technician and on-the-job training is the norm. Those who wish can sit for the certification exam and become Certified Pharmacy Technicians.
Eppley decided that she wanted more.
“I thought, ‘I kind of like this.’ So I went back and got my pharmacist’s degree which, at the time, was a five-year degree and started working as a practicing pharmacist,” she said.
Pharmacists are in great demand, so Upper Valley Medical Center provided scholarship funds for her to get her degree in pharmacy.
“I said I was interested in being a pharmacist, and I was a pharmacy tech so they sent me through school. I had to work for them for so many years afterward,” she said.
She said she gets recruiting calls and information daily from those looking for pharmacists.
Eppley worked at Upper Valley and then Miami Valley Hospital and then went into the retail end of the profession for a few years. After obtaining her doctorate (PharmD), she came to Wilson Memorial Hospital in Sidney as the Director of Pharmacy.
Eppley said there is a big difference between working in the local drugstore and working in a hospital.
“Retail pharmacists will take the prescription and fill it,” she said. “They will check for any drug interactions and check for drug disease interaction, counsel the patient and make sure the patient understands how to take the medication properly. Most will also tell them about any side effects.
“In a hospital we do things a little differently. We make IVs or we make chemotherapy agents, plus we dispense the medication in units of use versus a 30-day supply,” she added. “You get just what you need for each day. One of the reasons is that (medication orders) can change so often in an acute situation in a hospital.”
She adds that hospital pharmacists also check for the interactions of drugs as well as adjust dosing of the drug according to a physician’s orders.
“We use a lot of lab reports (to check the drug’s effectiveness),” she said.
Hospital pharmacists also provide some education to nurses and doctors and answer their medication questions.
It is difficult to become a pharmacist (the program is now six or eight years), but jobs are plentiful in many venues.
“They could do research, they could go into pharmacy law — they could go on and get their law degree in pharmacy,” she said. “They could work as drug (representatives). It is wide open and changing very rapidly.”
Since hospitals are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, shift work is possible in the pharmacy field. Other options include part-time work or even writing from home for pharmaceutical journals.
The need for pharmacists — and pharmacy directors — is likely to increase in the future.
“As our population gets older, there is an increase in medication use,” she said. “All the pharmacy graduates that I know had jobs before they graduated.”
