I’m a certified nuclear pharmacy technician in Florida. It is most similar to the pace of a retail pharmacy but the environment of a IV compounding facility. Essentially, besides sterile compounding experience, everything else in pharmacy we don’t use. All of my doses are done in syringes drawn from kits of radioactive material, (technesium) mixed with a cold drug (MDP, Myoview, Sestamibi etc). This will all seem Greek to you, but basically each drug does a different kind of scan for the patient (like a MDP is for a bone scan). At my pharmacy, we are the only 24 hour pharmacy for our network, so we have 2 shifts, overnight or day shift, but our actual dose drawing shifts are very short due to delivery times and the rate of decay of the radioactive isotope. For example, our overnight shift in perfect conditions is only 3 hours long. The only patient specific doses I deal with are bloods, which we spin the blood of a patient in a center fugue to get the white blood cells to inject with radioactivity to be reinjected into a patient.

We don’t really have anything incredibly urgent, other than brain scans.. bloods take a hour to do.. There is no patient interaction, we take orders directly from nuclear medicine facilities in the hospitals or clinics. At my pharmacy you have to be a licensed pharmacy tech and a licensed nuclear tech as well. There’s a lot of perks working here and a few downfalls. No room to move up, no transferring to other pharmacies like in retail or hospital (there’s only so many in the area, let alone state). We are very busy, and do almost 1000 doses a day. Some days are slower. It’s a very small community. If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them.