Outpatient Pharmacy and NUS

Yesterday I met up with my original preceptor who had some time to take me around to the other pharmacy operations in the hospital.  Singapore General Hospital is part of a health network called SingHealth and the best analogy to the system here is that it is like a Kaiser system.  There are six different health networks in Singapore and when patients see doctors at the hospital or clinics attached to the hospital, they will usually go to the outpatient pharmacy at that hospital campus to pick up their medications before going home.  That is why retail pharmacy is really more of an afterthought here, meaning very few people actually use a retail pharmacy to get their meds.  As you can imagine, the outpatient pharmacy at SGH gets pretty chaotic.  They have over 30 full time pharmacists who verify medications and perform clinical checks.  The really cool thing about this pharmacy is that they have a whole barcode, conveyor belt, robotic system that will take the script, count the number of tablets, packages, etc., and fill the prescription.  It is entirely automated and the strange thing here is that everything is in unit dose packages which is usually more expensive, but for some reason here it is cheaper.

Later on in the day, my actual preceptor took me over to the pharmacy school at the National University of Singapore to see the campus.  In a way, the pharmacy part of NUS is like UCSF or UCSD; it is only 2 buildings dedicated for pharmacy.  The class size is similar as well with 150 students or so per class.  The main difference is that these students will graduate with a BPharm.  Unlike at UCSF, the school of pharmacy here is an undergraduate program so students can start right after high school.  The PharmD program is another 2 years afterward and currently only has 9-10 students.  There is a lot more labwork in the NUS pharmacy curriculum so my preceptor took me to one of the labs where they learn compounding as well as what we would consider undergraduate chemistry lab:

Other than the fact that the NUS campus is so large there are 3 Starbucks on campus, it is just like any other college campus.