Pharmacy technician named best in state

As a 19-year-old English major at the University of Montana, Angela Jensen realized she needed something to fill the time between classes and her commute home to Stevensville. Her curiosity brought her to volunteer at Community Medical Center in Missoula, and the rest is history.

“I ended up in their radiology department and absolutely loved it. I just kind of bought into it,” Jensen said. “Every time I’ve even remotely thought of getting out of medicine something jerks me back in.”

Now a pharmacy technician at Alpine Apothecary, Jensen spends her days in the lab, creating all kinds of medications from scratch. It’s a job she enjoys, and one she excels at too. Jensen recently received the Pharmacy Technician of the Year award from the Montana Pharmacy Association, a distinction given out to techs who have been nominated by their peers for their exemplary work.

“I am very honored to receive the award and it means a lot that I have a reputation for excellence,” Jensen said.

Jensen received her certification for the job 10 years ago from Flathead Valley Community College and worked at Kalispell Regional Medical Center, first in the hospital pharmacy for three years before moving to the outpatient pharmacy for another three years, before working in Whitefish. She also served on the MPA board as the pharmacy technician representative in 2015.

“Angela is known as a relentless advocate for doing the right thing at the highest possible level of her profession in every situation,” MPA award presenter, Tony King said. “Angela’s employers confirm that she is always willing to stay a little later, work a little harder and dig just a little deeper if she knows its going to help the patients she serves.”

Jensen pointed to the pharmacists and technicians that have trained and mentored her throughout the years as also deserving the award, especially her colleagues at Alpine Apothecary.

“Becky Stillo is a pharmacist beyond compare. Her brilliance and encouragement to me have brought me to the next step as a technician,” she said. “This award is as much hers as mine.”

In the lab, Jensen looks like a veteran chef as she points out the bottles of ingredients lining her shelf — acetaminophen, ginger root, various hormones — and explains the myriad of medications she can create from them.

In addition to making human medications, she also gets to develop veterinarian medicines, where the challenge becomes how to give a small, four-pound rabbit the proper dosage of a drug.

A rewarding part of the job is fulfilling the needs of customers who can’t take commercial medications due to allergies or other complications. Being able to compound a medication catered to each customer’s specific needs provides Jensen with a challenge she’s always happy to take on.

“We’re able to fill a niche that really conventional medicine can’t always fit,” she said. “They can’t pick something off a shelf that’s going to work for them. And it can really be a game changer for a lot of people, finally they’re getting the type of medication delivered to them the way that they need it.”

When she’s not in the lab, Jensen said she’s usually cooking at home, another passion of hers. She also enjoys reading, kayaking and spending time with her husband Neil, her daughter Jenna and her two dogs, Ginger and Tilly.

When her career in medicine began as a volunteer decades ago, Jensen said she benefited from what she called “a lot of leeway” in the way things were done. However, she’s not sure she’d be able to collect such a variety of experiences in today’s stricter medical environment.

“At that time I got to go anywhere and see anything I wanted to see. I had a really great rapport with the technicians, and they would take me anywhere. ‘Here, throw on some scrubs,’ and I’d go into surgery,” Jensen said. “I assisted on procedures, did all kinds of great stuff that really would not happen now.”

Getting to experience so many different facets of medicine opened Jensen up to the rewards, and challenges, of helping patients. The lack of a weak stomach also helped, she said.

“It was just the excitement and the challenge and a little bit of the gore every now and then too,” Jensen said.