Ok... So maybe it wasn't that bad. There were just a few things that pissed me off:
When I walked in to open the pharmacy today, I found it in a state of total disaster. A floater had worked during the weekend, and it certainly showed. There were prescription labels left all over the place with little post-it notes attached that basically said some variation of "I don't really know how to do this, so I thought I'd leave it for you on Monday." I can't say for sure, but it looked a lot like the floater stopped filling new scripts for the last hour or so on Sunday because there were a whole bunch of new ones left for me to type. Additionally, the prescriptions that were filled weren't properly filed.
It took me about 20 minutes just to get my bearings and clean up the mess. It's a good thing I got there so damn early, so I had plenty of time to clean up and still get most of the prescriptions from the refill line done by the time we opened. Actually, I was really lucky in that 29 of the 39 prescriptions left on the refill line overnight were for drugs that we have in our ScriptPro. I've never seen that high of a percentage in the morning. Usually, I can count on about half of the prescriptions to be filled by ScriptPro. I just lucked out this morning... which probably means the next time I open, I'll have a morning where only 8 or 9 come out of ScriptPro.
Going off on a tangent- It's sad that I've become this accustomed to having that stupid robot. A few months ago, I had to fill in at another store for a few hours in the evening, and I felt so weird having to count drugs like HCTZ or Lipitor by hand. If you do a good job setting up ScriptPro, you don't have to hand count many drugs at all. The majority of the prescriptions that are not in our ScriptPro are birth control, fosamax/actonel, or albuterol inhalers. Before coming to my current store, I never had a ScriptPro, so you'd think I'd be used to counting by hand (which in most cases means running the tablets through a Kirby Lester, which is a laser pill counter). However, it doesn't take too long to be spoiled by the robot once you start working in a place that has one.
Anyway...Back to another thing that pissed me off today.
One of the pharmacists I worked with took a prescription over the phone from a doctor's office. Let me reiterate that she spoke to the doctor directly when she took this script. I was typing new prescriptions, so after she got off the phone, she handed me the script. I looked at it, and immediately asked her who the doctor was supposed to be because I had never heard of the name she wrote down, and it wasn't in our computer under her spelling or any spelling remotely similar. In addition, she never wrote down the office phone number, so I had no way of calling back to find out who it was. She had no idea who he was either, and said she wasn't even sure if the spelling was right because she couldn't really understand him.
Once again, maybe this a case of that UNCOMMON SENSE I talked about several posts ago, but I'd like to think that the normal thing to do if you get a phone call from a doctor's office you're unfamiliar with is to, oh I don't know, CHECK THE FUCKING COMPUTER TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE HIM ON FILE BEFORE YOU HANG UP THE PHONE!!!! At the very least get the damn phone number, so we can call back. All this dumbass did was write down an obviously horribly misspelled name. It wasn't like it was left on the voice mail this way. She spoke to the fucking doctor himself!!!
Honestly, there's no excuse for that. Ok... Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we just plain forget. It's human nature. I know. However, this particular pharmacist does this all the freaking time! We've addressed her regarding this bad habit, and she still fucking does it! How stupid and/or lazy do you have to be to continue to make the same damn mistake over and over again.
Most pharmacists that blog get pissed off at their stupid customers. My frustration, on the otherhand, tends to be caused by the bunch of morons I work with. Maybe that sounds mean. I guess it is mean. I don't care. I just don't have a whole lot of patience for stupidity. I don't mind someone not knowing how to do something or making a mistake because they're new and still learning. I don't mind teaching. I just hate showing someone the same thing or dealing with the same mistakes over and over and over and over again. I hate having my concentration interrupted in the middle of checking a prescription or investigating a potential interaction by one of our techs who can't figure out that the printer isn't printing because it's out of paper. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so fucking infuriating to watch 2 or 3 techs all fumbling around trying to figure something out in the computer system, where upon I'll walk over and fix their "problem" in 2 seconds.
I think it would be very beneficial to my stress level at work if there were a small room attached to the pharmacy with padded walls and sound proof insulation. That way, when I get to the point of boiling over with the frustration of dealing with stupidity, I can go in my nice little room, punch the walls, yell at the top of my lungs for a few seconds, and just release all that anger. Then, once it's out of my system, I can return to work refreshed.
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4 comments:
Mike, I agree with a lot of your posts. Regarding ScriptPro: Do you find it accurate (all the time, most of the time, some of the time). The reason I ask is because I have a Parata. It's real fast, but it seems like about 40% of what it counts is off (usually a pill or two, but nonetheless off). We end up double counting everything out of it. (It only takes about 5 seconds to double count 30 Lipitor, HCTZ, etc).
Regarding those "lazy" pharmacists, that chaps my ass a lot as well. Being a pharmacy manager of a high volume store, I don't have time with moronic bullshit like that. Keep up the good posting
I think the ScriptPro is pretty accurate. However, every once in a while, we will have someone come back saying that they were shorted a couple pills on a drug that came out of ScriptPro.
Of course, not many people actually count the pills that are in their bottle, so I can't be that certain just how often this really happens. We don't get many complaints, so we don't bother to double count the robot.
One of the upsides of being in a quiet store is not having too many other incompetent rphs to deal with. Just the occasional floater and my retard partner who is probably eligible for a telethon or some sort of endowment for the mentally deficient.
As I sit here reading your post at work, my tech is scratching his head dumbfounded as to why he's completing partial fills ( it's order day) for products that are already on the shelf in abundance.
As to scriptpro, I still wish I hasd one. I remember the days of Baker cells that required more time put into maintennace than time they saved. I remember Innovation cabinets also and the sweet feeling of banging out 30 call in refills in which every one was loaded into the machine. Made us feel warm and fuzzy all over.
I am a Technician, and we just had our Script Pro installed and it miscounts about 1 in every 5 and it dings at us every 5 minutes. Drug is out (not really), vials are empty (not really). I dont know if the person filling the robot is not doing this right or not telling the robot they filled the vials. I just hope this gets better because it took 15 min Monday to fill 90 lorcet 10-650, that is no lie. Please tell me this machine gets better.
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