PTCE Exam information

The Medications section is the largest part of the PTCE. It covers generic names, brand names, and classifications of medications; therapeutic duplications; common or life-threatening drug interactions and contraindications, including drug-drug, drug-dietary supplement, drug-laboratory, drug-nutrient, and drug-disease interactions; strengths and doses, dosage forms, routes of administration, special handling and administration instructions, and duration of therapy; common or severe side effects, adverse effects, and allergies; indications; drug stability for products such as oral suspensions, insulins, reconstitutables, injectables, and vaccinations; and proper storage, including temperature ranges, light sensitivity, and restricted access.

The Federal Requirements section of the PTCE covers the federal rules governing what a pharmacy may store, order, dispense, return, and destroy. It covers the requirements for storing, handling, and disposing of non-hazardous, hazardous, and pharmacological substances and wastes; controlled substance prescriptions and the DEA schedules; receiving, storing, ordering, labeling, dispensing, returning, take-back programs for, loss or theft of, and destroying controlled substances; restricted drug programs and the processing they demand, such as pseudoephedrine sales and Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS); FDA medication recall requirements; and the product serialization, tracking, tracing, and quarantining requirements of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA).

The Patient Safety and Quality Assurance section of the PTCE assesses how you prevent medication errors and what you do when one happens. It covers high-alert and high-risk medications and look-alike/sound-alike (LASA) drugs; error prevention strategies such as Tall Man lettering, separating inventory, leading and trailing zeros, bar code usage, and limiting error-prone abbreviations; recognizing the issues that require pharmacist intervention, including drug utilization review, adverse drug events, OTC recommendations, therapeutic substitution, adherence, and allergies; event reporting through MedWatch and VAERS, near-miss reporting, root-cause analysis, and continuous quality improvement; the types of prescription error; and infection prevention and cleaning standards.

The Order Entry and Processing section of the PTCE covers turning a prescription into a dispensed product, and it is where the exam's pharmacy math lives. It covers the formulas, calculations, ratios, proportions, conversions, sig codes, abbreviations, medical terminology, and symbols used to work out days' supply, quantity, dose, concentration, and dilutions; the equipment and supplies required for drug administration, from oral and injectable syringes to inhaler spacers, filters, and nebulizers; lot numbers, expiration dates, and National Drug Code (NDC) numbers; and the procedures for identifying and returning dispensable, non-dispensable, and expired medications and supplies.