- sticksy
- May 26, 2004
-
-
Nap Ghost
|
 hell yeah, this. I miss their kinda goofy old-school logo. I haven't realized they were bought out by JC Penny's of all places back in the 90’s.
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2019 09:56
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2024 10:29
|
|
- sticksy
- May 26, 2004
-
-
Nap Ghost
|
If you want to know whether your regional grocer pharmacy is a flaming fuckzone or merely an ok place to work, watch the staffing. Do they operate with one pharmacist per business day? Do the pharmacists get lunchbreaks? Does the pharmacist have two techs to manage general tasks and a cashier, or do the techs have to spend their entire shift running between drive through and front end while the pharmacist does every last thing on their own? Currently, Pharmacy Benefits Managers (insurance companies for insurance companies) are killing reimbursements on important medications through clawbacks, so revenue is down. While inventory is the largest cost associated with running a pharmacy by orders of magnitude, pharmacist salaries are relatively large and much easier to cut since pharmacy schools can't slow down graduating people without collapsing and we all know it. So the lovely companies cut pharmacist hours, removed overlapping shifts for support during busy hours, cut support staffing, "encourage" unpaid overtime and so on to keep profits up. The big boxes were already lovely to work for because they would commonly have you monitoring the filling of potentially dangerous medications for 12-14 hours a day without a lunch or piss break or even goddamn chairs. Now you're doing the same thing but with less help, more responsibilities than ever and new grads are getting paid ~$15 an hour less than starting salaries just three years ago. It's bad.
CVS has always been the worst, Walgreens a close second, and Walmart used to be surprisingly decent due to competitive wages, sufficient staffing and an hour long lunch break if you worked at least 10 hour shifts. They recently moved to single-pharmacist business days with half hour lunches. At least we can still stop for half an hour on a 13 hour day, but since pharmacies can't operate without a PharmD/RPh pharmacist on staff and close for lunch, customers rush the counter at 1:30 hoping you'll skip it or delay it for them, and there's always a line at 2:00 ready to scream at you for daring to put your basic biological needs before filling their maintenance meds.
If you're curious about the work breakdown, the general rule is (supposed to be) "cashiers and techs do what they CAN do, so the pharmacist is free to do what ONLY THEY can do".
Cashiers run registers and are the first face that catches upset patients. They can't legally do much else but their presence is still important to keep things going. A tech that has to stop their work to run a register is a pharmacist who has to stop their patient safety and efficacy job to do clerical work to keep up. These guys DO have to run all Sudafed requests through our state registry though, which pisses some people off.
Techs: These are the guys with colored shirts or vests running in circles around the place. They work intake for new prescriptions, input data for them to send to the pharmacist for verification, count and fill those prescriptions and then bag them together for you. They also field calls for us, cold call patients on refill adherence to get our STAR rating up for Medicare reimbursement, are first responders to insurance complications, sort our paper records for filing since that has to be kept for (x) years depending on state, ask our patients relevant questions regarding opioid prescriptions by corporate policy and get yelled at for it, handle routine drug ordering, filing and shelving the order when it shows up, call for simple prescription questions (with our supervision) when we don't have the time to do it ourselves, hand out paperwork for vaccinations, help put together weekend health-fair booths, work the thrice-damned motherfucking drive through, and at least a dozen other responsibilities I can't recall.
Pharmacists: We're the information heart of the operation. The basic concept is that we verify that all information concerning a prescription the techs have is correct, for the correct patient, and to evaluate risks for allergies, drug interactions, dose issues, and other general medication use questions. As you can probably imagine, there is by far too much for anyone to recall off their top of their head regarding the ridiculously vast world of medication chemistry and the resulting issues. We use our experience and what we know with pharmaceutical reference materials and custom programs that check your profile for known interactions of various severity and statistical reliability to make sure what you're taking makes sense for what's wrong with you, your age and sex, past medical history, known allergies and sensitivies, etc. However, the nature of chemical therapy is that realistically, most drugs have a big list of known side effects and interactions, but they just don't happen for everyone the same way, if at all. So we have to foresee potential problems with your therapy using your history and (potentially) conversations with your doctor if something is questionable. We also use the PMP to check people and prescriptions to make sure the new patient that brought in an RX for #180 Percocet 10mg 5 minutes before closing from a dentist 3 hours away isn't doctor/pharmacy shopping or spreading their opioids over several pharmacies to elude tracking. Opioid policing is another entire Pandora's Fuckpile of Problems but trust me when I say it isn't fun for anyone.
Of course, like I said before, understaffing is an issue so you can reasonably assume that the Pharmacist job description will include the Tech and Cashier description at any point for any length of time and not be wrong. If that period of time is 13 hours in a row because admin looked at your numbers and you don't need techs on these days and you don't have a relief pharmacist coming problems happen. You were checking an anticonvulsant because the doctor who wrote an antibiotic without knowing the patient's allergies is out at lunch and isn't available, phone line 1 is someone upset that prices are different between pharmacies and wants to sue you, line two is someone upset that their RX with 0 refills says "it's good until 2020!", line 3 is someone who wants to bring back their one week eye drop RX because the drops expire in 2022, line 4 is screaming that they don't know where their doctor called in their prescription; 3 people want flu shots and the fourth doesn't want to fill out paperwork and you're just exhausted because it's 6pm and you've been there since 7:30am without a piss break. Meanwhile there's a fight at the drive through, drop off, counseling and pickup have 8 people in line each because you don't have a cashier today and your tech is pinballing between each, fill is at 100 with 55 at input because there's no one to work the prescriptions, all of your racks are full because you don't have extra pairs of hands to bag, some rear end in a top hat just complained that you're lazy, all you do is count pills and OH gently caress THAT ANTICONVULSANT WASN'T FOR LITHIUM poo poo WHERE IS IT!?!
I'm sorry sir, this is the CVS drive through
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2019 20:59
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2019 09:56
