You Should Have Called Me...

I am exhausted.  I worked today and we were able to fill 381 scripts.  That may not sound like much for the macho pharmacies, but for one that usually fills ~250, it was a lot.

After class I walked into the pharmacy hearing this:

"You should have called me!"

Oh noes.  What happened?  Did we fill for the wrong drug?  Wrong strength?  Wrong amount?  Used an old insurance?

No, the patient was upset because we should have called them to let them know we were out of a medication and it wouldn't be delivered until tomorrow.  All well and good, except....

• They had transferred this prescription from another pharmacy
• We had never filled anything for them before and therefore we had no profile for them
• We had no phone number for the patient
• We had told the pharmacist at the transferring store that we did NOT have this medication in stock

The patient claims that we need to reimburse them for EVERYTHING.  They said that we should have called them, but how could we do that?  Why would they want to transfer their medicine without verifying that another store has it in stock?  Why didn't the transferring pharmacist explain that we didn't have it?

It just sucked 15 minutes out of our productivity.  We were able to find the patient a "partial fill" at a local store, but they're still going to transfer it back to stay with us.

I feel so loved.

Then for the next 20 minutes all anyone talked about was that patient, further sucking out productivity.  I sometimes feel like everyone is moving through molasses, taking their sweet time.

One patient waited 1.5 hours for their lortab.  They sat so patiently.  I kept waiting for the script to come up to be filled, but to no avail: it was stuck in troubleshoot.  I finally asked the pharmacist why and they said it was because it didn't have the patient's address written on the prescription.

I went out to them and wrote it down.  The medicine was done within 10 minutes (super busy night).

My store has a rule that if is a controlled substance we have to write down the patient's address on the hardcopy of the prescription.  That's fine, I understand (to an extent) the reasoning behind this precaution.

However, write a note in the computer SAYING WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE PRESCRIPTION and don't make a poor person in pain wait for 1.5 hours for their medication.

Also today in class we talked about why the pharmacist shortage is essentially coming to an end, but we'll save that talk for a later day.  I have 2 tests and 2 quizzes to study for...