 My name is Diana Mechley. I am an instructor slash professor at Niagara College in the Allied Health Program for the pharmacy program specifically. I teach second year students primarily in sterile prep, in hospital labs, and computer labs. Pharmacy entails the retail side, our community pharmacy, and also hospital pharmacy. So we do incorporate both. Our students are really fortunate. We have a great facility here. We have a community pharmacy setup where students can role play that they are actually working in a community pharmacy, where they're dispensing, compounding, doing billing, actually entering into the computer, counting the medications that are required, and then we have a whole other lab that is set up for hospital pharmacy, which is different in community where we have more IVs. So we have a hospital lab where the students are filling 24-hour unit dose cassettes that is mainly used in hospitals these days, that type of delivery system. And then we also have a sterile preparation lab where the students are getting hands-on experience with IV medication. We have the National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities, which actually sets competencies and standards of practice for pharmacy tax. So pharmacy technician is a profession. It is a healthcare profession. We are regulated. We join about 25 other healthcare professions that are self-regulating. So we have competencies and standards that every course in college across Canada has to fulfill. So we're very lucky that we can build our program around these competencies and standards. There will be written tests, and a lot of it is the hands-on. So if they're entering prescriptions, they'll be marked for their accuracy of all the fundamentals that they have to get correct. The patient, the doctor, the drug itself, the quantity, the day supply. So they are marked on what they're inputting and of course their understanding of the prescription because that's what they have to input. For the sterile prep, we are marking them on their actual skills that we build on from day one. We start off with maybe just getting them used to handling syringes and needles and the different sizes and the selection that they would take. And then we build upon that and there's four skills altogether that they have to do. The first one would be the aseptic garbing and hand washing because there's a specific way they have to wash and dress before they go into the clean room to actually prepare sterile products. And then there's removing fluid from an ampule, then from a vial and then reconstituting a powder that's in a vial and removing that, injecting into the bag. So we're building every week on their skills and every skill set they're tested on along the way. And then at the end it's a cumulative test where they have to do everything from the hand wash to the garbing and all of the skills that they have learned. Our students do have to go two month placement at the end of their two years. One month in a community pharmacy, one month in a hospital. So we're really proud that we send them out really well equipped because they've been working for months in the life life setting, doing the actual skills that they will be having to do when they go out on placement and hopefully get a job. So they kind of hit the ground running. There's a company that provides everything like for the sterile prep. There's a company that provides it so it's in ampules, it's in vials. We get the mock label so it's a practically amp on it and it's only water inside. But the needles and syringes absolutely are real life. We order from the same distributor that supplies hospitals. And for the actual drug side we use tic-tacs and candies and things. And we do have actually a Pac-Med machine which is a machine that actually provides unit dose of every medication which is very common right now in the hospitals so that every pill is individually packaged and labeled and the nurse dispenses a 24-hour supply. So the hospitals have a very large computerized system but we do have the miniature version which is exactly like what they have in the hospitals. So that is real from the manufacturer or the distributor that provides the same equipment to hospitals. We provide our students with simulated prescriptions but they're all the same what they would find in the real life situation. We like to get, there's a list every year. The Ministry of Health will provide a list of the most common prescribed medications. So we like the students to build on that because when they do go out into the workforce we want them to be familiar with all the more common drugs. So we will give them prescriptions, they will have case scenarios that they work on that we will enact so that there's a teacher and a technologist in every lab. And oftentimes one of us will be in the office, we will be calling the students when they're in the community pharmacy, we'll pretend we're a doctor's office or a patient calling in. The other technologist or instructor will actually be bringing prescriptions up to the counter they're actually filling and they have to problem solve, they have to manage their workflow, they have to work as a team, we don't let them pick their own teams because we find students will form their little groups so we don't want them kind of in their comfort zone because when they are, we try to get them their hard skills the skills that they actually need for the trade but we also want them to practice their soft skills because that's the feedback that we're getting from our placement partners that they really need good team players, they need students that can converse with the customers so communication is a big deal also. So we do a lot of group activities with them and we get them out of their comfort zone, we'll select their groups and we'll try to see how they work together and we will emphasize that that is part of the real life experience you don't get to pick your co-workers and you just have to learn to get along some have weaknesses, some have strengths and you just all have to kind of pull together because as a healthcare worker the primary concern is the patient so they have to know that it's not them or their co-worker it's about the person on the other side of the counter or in the hospital bed that you have to think about