Loretta Philpot’s career is a lesson in learning, especially the knowledge curve she faced in 2020 when she became a pharmacy tech at Saint Joseph London — after nine years in retail pharmacy at Walmart.
“It was a pretty huge transition. It was a whole new world of pharmacy when I first started,” she said. “There were so many medications that I wasn’t familiar with and so many different perspectives of patient care than I had ever seen in retail.”
Learning about IV drips, sedative medications and crash cart protocols, for example, were quite a contrast to retail pharmacy medications.
But, explained Loretta, “I wanted the experience. I wanted to expand my knowledge of being a pharmacy tech, outside of just being a retail tech.”
Though she missed the daily interactions with patients picking up prescriptions, she views the inpatient work at Saint Joseph as a trade-off, because she has learned so much.
The people she works with helped her, she said, from mentors to other techs.
This wasn’t the end of her learning, however — among the reasons she was named Saint Joseph London’s Employee of the Year in May.
She has been cross trained to handle medication reconciliation (interviewing overnight admissions about their regular medications) and she took on the inventory specialist role in 2022. She helped field questions from staff and others when the hospital switched medication cabinet suppliers earlier this year, which required time-consuming planning and preparation. “It was a lot of work, but we did it so effortlessly with the team we had,” she said.
Loretta has been praised for her attention to detail in making sure pharmacy processes are done correctly and in a timely manner. She said she’s always been somewhat detail-oriented — as a student, she was “one who loved school and was a nerdy note-taker” — but being in the pharmacy field has really honed that trait.
“I think just being in the medical field and dealing with patients’ medications and knowing how important and how dangerous medications are, I feel like that enhanced it,” she said.
Loretta views her pharmacy work as “a different way of helping people. … I do find purpose in doing all I do at the hospital. All of that is essential in taking care of the patient, to help them get better — like I’m in the background helping them get the care they need.”
She thinks of Saint Joseph’s values as “the steppingstones to being a great person, of being somebody that you can rely on, that you can come to if you need help. That you feel like you’re taken care of if you talk to me, feel like you’re in good hands and you feel safe.”
Loretta cited her parents — her father died in 2020 and her mother in 2022 — as major influences on her: “They always pushed me to be the best that I could be. They told me to work for a life worth living and to treat people the way I want to be treated, and to always care about the way you present yourself and how you can help others.” She attributed her “big heart” and desire to help others to her mom.
Before moving to London, Loretta was a member of the Crossroads Volunteer Fire Department in East Bernstadt (also in Laurel County) for 4 ½ years. “I loved it,” she said, “but I moved outside the district.”
While she’s thought about joining another fire department, she hasn’t yet, “because it’s been on my heart to go back to school and focus on a career path in the pharmacy field.” Her current and past supervisors and colleagues have encouraged her to become a pharmacist. It’s a move she has always wanted to make, but at this point, she said, “I just haven’t gotten the nerve to take that step and do it.”
For now, Loretta said she focuses on finding ways to advance her knowledge and skills to help all those around her at Saint Joseph London.
Humankindness works here. Learn more about careers at CHI Saint Joseph Health.
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