• Question: Is it true that computers are taking over doing pharamacists jobs?

    Asked by to Ben, Dave, Ditte, Heather, Rebecca on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rebecca Gladstone

      Rebecca Gladstone answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Computers are helping us to do also most all jobs now! They help us to do thinks more quickly or more accurately like a simple calculator does and they help us predict things like the weather or the shape of a molecule by creating different scenarios doing the maths over and over again so that we can pick the most common outcome and use that as our best guess.
      They help us by doing jobs that we couldn’t do in our entire lifetimes if we had to sit down and work each part out ourselves!

      There is software to designed to help pharmacists do their jobs by making orders, check how drug interact, manage drug stock and even more! Computers can certainly make our lifes easier, but we still need people to use the computers and tell them what to do, often the jobs are changed when computers arrive but they aren’t running the show without us! (yet?!)

    • Photo: Ben White

      Ben White answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      Pretty much yes, as Rebecca explained above.
      Here’s a video of a completely automated pharmacy in action… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oumlYbwfAsI

      Also, computers are playing more a part than ever when it comes to looking at the chemical structure of drugs, and finding new ones. The algorithms used, and amount of data they can get through, will begin to outpace scientists doing this manually more and more.

    • Photo: Ditte Hedegaard

      Ditte Hedegaard answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I agree with Rebecca and Ben in that computer are an important tool for helping pharmacists design new drugs.

      Some computer programs can give information about the physical shape and stability of a drug, however the computer programs depend on the input from pharmacists and cannot design new drugs on its own without being told which chemical to use. Although the computer might have come up with a new chemical compound it is not able to accurately predict how the human body will react to it and the potential new drug has to be tested in the laboratory, on laboratory animals and in patients. These jobs are usually done by pharmacists and doctors. I think we are still a long time away from computers taking over the pharmacist jobs, but perhaps one day we will develop computers which can come up with chemical compounds itself and test it against uploaded information about the human body.

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