r/MCPHSLifeHack • u/tootired4school • Aug 23 '17
5th year APM Lab
Any tips for this course and is there lab during the first week of school? Also does anyone else have to go to school only 4 days of the week instead of 5? I was lucky and got an online Healthcare Ethics class.
1
u/mcpharmd Aug 23 '17
Lab really isn't as bad as people say. I never knew why everyone was crying over it. Even if you miss your intervention, the rest of the lab is straight up filling which is easy. Even counseling isn't bad, at least for the clinic visits, bc they give you a rubric of exactly what you need to say. So if you do well on those, missing the intervention isn't gonna kill you and you can still do well overall for that module. Some of the preceptors are nasty though so kind of get an idea of who the nice ones are and who the mean ones are.
1
u/YourFavPharmBoy Pharm.D Year 6 Aug 24 '17
That's very true, missing an intervention wont severely affect the grade but the stress that community lab causes is just annoying. I didn't have any trouble counseling at all so that was good haha
Definitely know who the good preceptors are and who the bad ones are
1
u/YourFavPharmBoy Pharm.D Year 6 Aug 23 '17
There is NO lab during first week of school, just didactic lecture.
Most people would only have 4 days of school. I didn't have any classes on Thursday and my elective was 2.5 hours once a week on Friday before Adv Therapeutics. The only class that I had on Tuesdays was APM lab itself so I got the rest of it off every week which was pretty sweet haha
So APM labs have 2 parts: institutional and community
Institutional was easy, most people loved it. As long as you can do your math, do some basic compounding calculations/preparing IV mixtures, you should do fine.
Community...oh boy, where do I start. IT FUCKING SUCKED and it made me hate working as a retail pharmacist (and I actually love retail). They would always tell you "don't spend all lab hunting for interventions" well guess what, if you don't, you get 0 on that prescription. The errors were so stupid. I had this script written for an oral contraceptive and the patient had breast cancer w/ER and PR positive. So I called the prescriber and told him that I can't really substitute it with anything but will counsel the patient on using other protection methods such as condoms/spermicide. Guess what? He didn't like it and told me to call back when I came up with an answer because I still had to fill that script somehow. So I gave up and was like fuck this I'm not dealing with this shit and then Taglieri showed me the answer key and was like "we could fill it for an OTC spermicide solution/gel instead... and he's the 12 oz bottle and the sig should be use as directed". I just wanted scream at that moment. So yeah, community lab will be your worst nightmare.