CVS CVS Assessment Medication Safety and Error Prevention Questions and Answers 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the primary purpose of the 'five rights' of medication dispensing at CVS?
- To speed up prescription processing
- To ensure the right patient gets the right drug, dose, route, and time (Correct answer)
- To meet corporate sales targets
- To reduce pharmacist workload
Correct answer: To ensure the right patient gets the right drug, dose, route, and time
The five rights—right patient, drug, dose, route, and time—are the foundation of safe medication dispensing.
Question 2: A customer hands you a prescription and the drug name looks similar to another medication on the shelf. What should you do first?
- Fill the one you recognize and check later
- Alert the pharmacist immediately before proceeding (Correct answer)
- Ask the customer which one they usually take
- Dispense the lower-risk drug to be safe
Correct answer: Alert the pharmacist immediately before proceeding
Look-alike/sound-alike drugs are a leading source of dispensing errors, so the pharmacist must verify before any action.
Question 3: Which practice best prevents a medication mix-up when filling multiple prescriptions at once?
- Work quickly to keep the queue moving
- Keep each patient's prescriptions physically separated at all times (Correct answer)
- Rely on memory for frequent customers
- Group prescriptions by drug type for efficiency
Correct answer: Keep each patient's prescriptions physically separated at all times
Physical separation of each patient's prescription bag or workspace prevents cross-patient medication errors.
Question 4: What should a CVS pharmacy technician do if they notice a potential drug-drug interaction while entering a prescription?
- Override the alert to save time
- Ignore it if the prescriber is well-known
- Flag it for the pharmacist to review before dispensing (Correct answer)
- Tell the customer to consult their doctor later
Correct answer: Flag it for the pharmacist to review before dispensing
Pharmacists are licensed to evaluate drug interactions; technicians must flag alerts and never override them without pharmacist review.
Question 5: High-alert medications at CVS require extra verification steps primarily because:
- They are the most expensive drugs in the pharmacy
- Errors with these drugs are more likely to cause serious patient harm (Correct answer)
- They are frequently counterfeited
- They expire faster than other medications
Correct answer: Errors with these drugs are more likely to cause serious patient harm
High-alert medications such as anticoagulants and insulin have a narrow margin for error and can cause severe or fatal harm.
Question 6: After filling a prescription, what is the best final safety check before handing medication to a patient?
- Confirm the price matches the receipt
- Verify the label matches the original prescription in drug, strength, quantity, and patient name (Correct answer)
- Check that the bottle cap is child-resistant
- Confirm the insurance was billed correctly
Correct answer: Verify the label matches the original prescription in drug, strength, quantity, and patient name
A final label-to-prescription comparison catches data-entry errors before the medication reaches the patient.
CVS CVS Assessment Medication Safety and Error Prevention Questions and Answers 1
What is the primary purpose of the 'five rights' of medication dispensing at CVS?