A couple weeks ago, I looked at my account at Google Analytics and saw that the number of “unique” visitors per day had been nearly 700.  I took a look at what was on the Main Page.  It was the letter written by a female WAG pharmacist.  It was directed to Mr. Wasson, WAG’s CEO.  It was highly critical.  The pharmacist suggested that Wasson had ruined Walgreens and that he should resign. 
Last week, I wrote the “Vacation” essay below.  Google Analytics report that around 600 unique visitors visited last week.  I had written, once again, about the non-pharmacist, bean-counting, MBA Masters of the Universe.  I don’t have to be polite here. This is not Drug Topics.  I’m not going to pretend anythng, but the truth.  That is:  I hate the MBA Masters of the Universe fuckers and what they have done to ruin our industry.  Notice that I did not say profession.  The fuckers cannot hurt the profession.  Only pharmacists can hurt the profession.
I asked a sophomore at a Boston college to design this site.  I asked Drug Topics to include www.jimplagakis.com in my bio in the magazine.  That was in Novemeber, 2005.  That’s it.  That is the only way that traffic on this site went from arouund 10 a day to 700 unique a day.  Ronald Benson in Alabama probably counted for 4 of the 10, coming back multiple times every day.  Jay Pee’s most loyal fan, and a friend. 
After looking at the 700 and 600, I concluded that you don’t give a shit about cutesy stories about the obese 30 year woman with a pretty face who comes to see the pharmacist for moral support for her diet.  I am just a frikkin’ enabler.  She still eats crap.  I tried tough love. She has a pretty face.  Those eyes kill me.  She didn’t come back for three weeks.  I am an idiot thinking that I can help people like her.  Am I an idiot?  My point is, If I am going to write a cutesy, feel good essay, I better follow quickly with some RED MEAT.
You are motivated to come, read and comment when the essays are about real shit.  Finally, finally, we are getting attention shown to our working conditions.  We had to come through the back door.  Pointing at the fact that these conditions compromise the pharmacist’s ability to deliver POISONS safely.  The public is in jeopardy every day around 8:00 PM in most CVS stores.  Think about it.  The pharmacist has worked 12 hours and still has 2 hours to go.  The tech left.  The pharmacist is working alone.
It was The Pharmacy Alliance that started punching the message a tired pharmacist is a dangerous pharmacist about 2 years ago.  TPA planted the seed.  I invite you to go to www.thepharmacyalliance.com take a look and join.
A couple weeks ago, at 8:45 PM on a Friday night, I was presented with 28 prescriptions. 19 for a just released heart transplant patient and 9 Rxs for a just released kidney transplant patient.  What the…?  We had other work to do.  The technician was scheduled to leave at 9:00 PM.  I called the manager on duty and said this, “I have all this new work.”  I shook the 8 x 11 paper Rxs.  “Plus other prescriptions.  I am keeping Tom.  We may not get out until after ten.”  She said, “Okay”.  Pretty cool.  I would guess that a CVS or RAD pharmacist could be screwed.  Tom took care of all of the regular work.  I scanned, typed, reviewed, filled and verified all of the 28.  Think about it.  28 new Rxs when closing time is in 85 minutes.  Would your company allow you, a 2 day a week pharmacist, to make the call about keeping the tech.  We got it all done by 10:00 PM.  I did NOT counsel. My weekend was screwed.  I am truly too old for that shit.  It is killing me.
Now, what I really want to write is an invitation to non-pharmacist, bean-counting MBA Masters of the Universe to give us their view of the failing INDUSTRY and to tell us that I am wrong.  It is not their fault.  Here it goes.
Dear Masters of the Universe.
Come and tell is why Jay Pee is full of it.  Now, remember that Jay Pee has accused you of having NO STANDING in pharmacy.  He has claimed that none of you have ever stood at a Drive Through window and been forced to inhale poison exhaust from an old 1997 Cadillac Seville.  Jay Pee has said that a drunk at the Drive Through has never been part of your work day.  You have never had to deal with an old lady at the Drive Through.  She pays with a check, then she doesn’t leave.  She sits there and records the check in her check book and then.. she has to do the subtracting to record her check book blance.  You have never had to deal with the NEXT person in line who blames you because she had to wait.  “I have been sitting in this line for 15 minutes.”  Then you tell her that her order is not ready.  “What?  I called it in to the computer.” You turn and see a guy at the register.  His face is red.  His throat is bulging.  His eyes are damaging you.  “Why did you help those people in their cars first?  I brought my prescription in an hour ago.”
Admit it, MOTU, you know nothing about the Drive Through and you still send out policy statements about the Drive Through.  Like how fast we should get to the window.  You have NO STANDING, man.
Jay Pee says that you, Mr. MOTU, have never taken an insurance card for an out of towner who works for the Sisters of Mercy Grade School in East Original, Wyoming.  You have never even entered a MEDCO card. (It’s Paid Rx).  You have never entered a new patient, with allergies and health conditions.  You have never typed in a new prescription. 

You have never filled a prescription.  You have never compounded a simple cream of two ingredients that are both water miscible.  You have never put away an order.  You, Mister MOTU, have NO STANDING in the pharmcy.  How could you (or anyone who knows NOTHING about the pharmacy) think that your programs for the pharmacy are intelligent?
The duties I listed here are technician jobs.  Guess what?  You, Mister MOTU, could easily get qualified as technician.  Take you 6 weeks of wood shedding.
I didn’t even list pharmacist jobs because you could NEVER qualify as a pharmacist.  Your MBA would not transfer.  You would have to do the 6 years.  If you are NOT an RPh and if you have NOT worked in pharmacies for at least a year, you, my good MOTU friend, have NO STANDING in the pharmacy. 

It is a joke when you go all happy faced to the executive suite and cheerily announce, “I got a good idea.  Let’s promise WAIT TIMES of no longer than 15 minutes in the pharmacy.  If we fail, we give a $25 gift card.”  Throw money.  That’s always your answer.  You cut tech hours to pay for the gift cards.  How fucked up is that?
Jay Pee says that you are a joke.  You have NO STANDING and you believe that you can cut tech hours and save money.  I know, I know, your job is to be like a pig rooting for waste.  Asshole, cutting tech hours is an idiotic move.  It pisses people off.  They go elsewhere when they have to wait 2 hours and their order is still not ready.  What happened to customer service?  The 2 hours a day that you cut, the tech is not filing her finger nails.  She is working hard to make money for the company. 

 
Jay Pee says that you, MOTU, need to get out of the pharmacy and be sent to the variety store where you belong.  He wants a good pharmacy merchant pharmacist to take your seat at the table.
What do you think of that?
Jay Pee says that he reserves the right to return to this subject.  Because, you, have been ruining a great business for 3 decades.  You really need for a pharmacist to find you and a pretty girl at a bar on Saturday night. 

You are looking good MOTU.  Nice black pants, sort of pegged.  A jacket with thin lapels.  A great shirt, not tucked in.  The problem is the look on your face when the pharmacist leaves with the pretty girl and takes her home for the night.
Come on, MOTU, let’s be friends.  Let’s work this out.  Oh, ignore that guy behind me with the knuckles.  He is just a CVS pharmacist from Tupelo, Mississippi.
Sincerely, with love
One of the 700

Siesta Beach on Siesta Key.  At this time of the year, no crowds at the # 1 rated beach in the U.S.A.  It is a ten minute drive from our place.  We will pass a CVS, a Walgreens and an independent.  I’ll close my eyes.

We will be in Sarasota until mid-July.  I will do my best to not think about the downwards spiral that the non-pharmacist bean-counting Masters of the Universe have us spinning on.  I will still read and answer e-mails from pharmacists and technicians.  I will still add essays here, if  I feel like it.  I will still wonder how the K**** H******, 3 P X and the North Carolina Board of Pharmacy comes out.  K***** hasn’t told me when the final deal will come down.

We really do need to step up and get a seat at the table.  Pharmacy is near a wreckage because the power has been handed to smart aleck MBA Masters of the universe.  Pharmacists have very little say about what happens in the business of pharmacy.  Don’t tell me that a pharmacist came up with the $4.00 prescription.  It was not a pharmacist who said, “Let’s give away $25.00 gift cards to get them to transfer prescriptions”.

More of the same.  Everywhere you look, a shiny initiative is announced by a company.  The Masters of the Universe have to do something to justify their salaries.  What looks shiny and bright is just the old and dull polished.   Dan’t you see a toothy grin when one of the Masters of the Universe says, “Let’s give away gift cards.”  What the …..?  How is this new?  It is simply throwing money away.  It is what they have been doing for over 30 years.  They have shown me that they are not capable of creating the quantum shift that is the only way we can save pharmacy.

Here is what they do:

More…. Better…. Different .

They take the old, tired, broken ideas and they try to do it MORE.  If that doesn’t work (And it never works) they try to do it BETTER. (More failure).  The last hope is to try to do it DIFFERENT. (It is still the same smelly shit)

No matter what they try to get a competitive advantage, IT IS THE SAME AS THEY HAVE TRIED HUNDREDS OF TIMES.  Customers are not impressed.  They do not even hear the television commercials.  It is expensive white noise.

You can start by snickering when you are informed of a new, shiny program thought up by the Masters of the Universe.  It is not new. It is simply ridiculous.  The MBA non-pharmacists bean-counters have NO STANDING in the pharmacy.  They do not even hear the music.  You, on the other hand, are Travolta.   You dance the dance without even thinking about it.

The MBAs have never stood at the drive through.  They have never been in the grinder that is retail chain pharmacy on a Friday evening around 5:30 PM.  They have NO STANDING.  Why should anyone listen to them?  Why show the people who are ruining us any respect?  They need to get out in the variety store where they belong.  Think about it.  If could not be worse if they hired a grocery store manager to run the show.  Oh, they did.  The CEO of Rite-Aid is a grocer from Pathmark Grocery.

I worked for Pay ‘n Save ( a Seattle Company ).   In the 1990s, they had a committee of feet-on-the-floor pharmacists review and talk about the programs that came from the executive suite.   The committee gave thumbs up or thumbs down.   There were few, if any, bullshit promotions, policies or programs.

The biggest question, I think, is:  How are pharmacists going to get seats at the table? I believe that pharmacists could make the difference if they were given the opportunity.

I see no value in a $25 gift card.  They transfer their Rx, get the card, then transfer it the another place to get a gift card there.  MORE, BETTER, DIFFERENT.  The same old bull shit.

Professional services.  We have to do better.  There is a reward.  When you counsel appropriately, you will find that some people will ask, “Is this something new?”  Most appreciate the information.  We need to shine a spotlight on the “duty to warn” station.

Pharmacists with a seat at the table!  Pharmacists are smart people.  Most of them know the business.  Some of them are ready and able to go head to head with the Masters of the Universe if needed.

If you have NOT noticed, both the profession of Pharmacy and the business of Pharmacy are at a crisis point.  I distinguish between the PROFESSION and the BUSINESS.  The only thing that ties them together is that they happen in the same room.

You wear two hats.  A huge business sombrero and a tiny professional beany.  It is a screwed up deal and the road to what it is today is close to 40 years long.  I have written extensively in my books about the history we have endured.  I have practiced during three eras of pharmacy.  The Classic Era that began with the Durham-Humphrey Amendment.  The Modern Era that began with the Pharmacy Computer and software.  The Dark Era that began when it was discovered that they could use software to spy on pharmacists.

The Modern Era was a terrific time to practice pharmacy.  The Classic Era was when pharmacy was sent to the back of the bus.  Durham-Humphrey was not well thought out.  We became the doctors’ lackey and Pharma’s pimp.  You know what is happening in the dark era.

Can the PROFESSION and the BUSINESS be saved?  I believe so.  We need pharmacists making decisions and choices.  The big companies that have pharmacies need to stop throwing money at all of their problems.  It does not work.

Whoops, I typed PHARMACY Drive Through

I do not like the drive-through.  I hate it when the customer (I hesitate to say ‘Patient’) is driving a 1995 Cadillac and refuses to turn off the engine.  Noxious fumes come wafting into the pharmacy and I have to breathe that shit.  I am so damned prejudiced against slovenly, obese people wearing sweaty wife-beaters and eating a triple burger from Whataburger that I want to puke.   When I look at the woman in the passenger seat and see hefty left arm with multiple tattoos, I think bad thoughts that are hardly generous and loving.  That hefty arm is usually attached to an obese example of lost and forgotten feminine pulchritude.  The children in the back are fighting and the best example of parenting comes from the driver.  ”Shut the fuck up or I will break your fuckin’ head.”  He looks to the woman.  ”It’s your fuckin’ fault.  You refused to get abortions.”  The prescriptions are for Norco-10 and carisoprodol 350.

This essay is not about that.  I hate it when anyone uses the drive through when they do not have to.  I commend the company I work for.  It is okay to tell a pissed-off-because-she-has-to-wait-5-minutes well dressed, fit woman.  ”Ma’am, the drive through is NOT an Express Lane.  It is a convenience.  There are people in the store who have been waiting for 20 minutes.  I am going to get them first.”  This happens usually on Friday evenings when is just me and the technician.

I hate it when there is a car that refuses to “drive around” and waits for the order to be ready.  Actually, I do not hate that.  I really hate it when car number three finally makes it to the window and the bitch blames me because she had to sit and wait.  I have never said this, but my 60 year old, tall, imposing male tech has, “This is not McDonald’s.  The pharmacist gives every prescription his full attention.  It takes a little time.”

I will not serve anyone who walks up to the drive through window.  They could get run frikkin’ over, standing there.  ”Get out of here.  You could get frikkin’ run over by some idiot on a cell phone.  Come in the store.”   If they argue.  ”The company’s insurance does not cover you getting run over.”  Back to work.  If I hear horns honking, the idiot is still standing there.  The drama of the drive through.

I gave my male tech trouble a few weeks ago when he went out front for an OTC item for a drive through customer.   Company training stipulates that we DO NOT get OTC items.   It takes too long.  I watched him return with a bottle of APAP 500mg.  After he sold it, I jumped him.  As usual, the way I do things, I forged ahead.  Will I ever learn?  ”Come on, Jim.  Have a heart.  She is a good customer and she is on crutches.”  What could I say?  ”Oh, sorry for jumping you, Tom.”

None of that is my purpose in writing this.  My real purpose is to start a discussion about how the drive through puts the patient in danger because pharmacists cannot live up to our duty to warn adequately using a intercom system that may be decades old, compromised by moisture.   There is a barrier.  We are removed from the patient or the caregiver.  We cannot show them the pills.  We cannot demonstrate how an albuterol MDI is used.  If the patient is a child and it is the first ever MDI, how can you do your job?  If the Rx is for a tapered dose of prednisolone 15mg/ 5ml.  How can you explain dosing when the young mother is on the frikkin’ phone.

The drive through is a death trap, potentially.

I have no problem having the technician tell the patient or caregiver that I want them to come into the store, to the consultation window.  The technician knows that when I want them inside, we will ring the Rx up inside.  The interesting aspect of this is that almost 100%, they take the counseling seriously.  I can see the wheels turning:  This must be really serious if he is making me come inside.

Suck it up.  You are the pharmacist. It is always your call.

If the non-pharmacist store manager gets pissed, do what Pharmacisst Steve has been recommending for over a year.  Write a letter to the store manager asking for clarification.  Send a copy to the Pharmacy District Manager and (most important) to the Chief Compliance Officer. The COO is the company’s cop.  It is his ass if laws are broken.  No one wants the COO in the loop.  Write something like this.

During our conversation last week, you demanded that I do not ask for a prescription patient to leave the drive through and come into the store so I can adequately counsel.  I make the request to have the patient (or caregiver) come into the store when the counseling is sufficiently complicated that I am not confident that counseling over the intercom is adequate.  Please confirm your orders to me in writing.  I want to remind you that there is a legal mandate that pharmacists counsel.  If you presume that you can tell me not to counsel or how to counsel, I will take exception.  I have always been an effective and loyal employee of 3 P X.  When I am the pharmacist on duty, I am the only authority in the pharmacy.  My call will stand.  You might want to discuss this matter with the company’s Chief Compliance Officer.  In the meantime, mind your own business and stay out of the pharmacy.

If you really want to stir the shit, send copies to the Board of Pharmacy in your state and also to the Attorney General.

After sending this letter Certified/Return Receipt, you will probably be protected by the company’s (also legal) non-retaliation policy.  Goooo Fooor It.

Once again, I believe that the Oregon Board of Pharmacy is on a roll.   When they look at the intrinsic dangers of failing to warn simply because of the physical barrier, the Oregon BOP will be the first to ban the drive through.

Mary K, Walker, R.Ph. Executive

4/4/12

Steve Ariens, P.D.

National Public Relations Director, The Pharmacy Alliance

The Wyoming State Board of Pharmacy met on March 20-21, 2012 and reviewed your letter of January 12, 2012.  They discussed the various suggestions for medication safety in the workplace of a retail pharmacy.

The board appreciates the efforts of your group to enhance patient care by improving work conditions.

In 2011 revisions to the Rules and Regulations, Wyoming Pharmacy Act, were proposed and approved by the board after a public hearing.   A new section requiring mandatory breaks if a pharmacist worked six hours or longer was approved after some heated discussion.  The rules package was sent to Governor Matt Mead but that particular section was struck from his approval. He stated that the board did not have the authority to mandate such working conditions.

The Wyoming Pharmacy Association conducted a survey through their website and collected information about meal breaks and other concerns.

Sincerely,

Mary K. Walker, R.P:h.

Governor Matt Mead

If you have any doubts about Mead’s political loyalties, go to You Tube and view his  inaugural address.  If you are an independent pharmacy owner in Wyoming and you voted for this guy, your vote was another nail in your coffin.  Wyoming is the smallest state (population).  The Board of Pharmacy did the right thing.  They lived up to the mandate to protect the public and the governor killed their action with little examination.  All he could see was that limiting pharmacists to 6 hours with no break could hurt the big companies.  Too bad.

Mary’s letter indicates that the BOP was mightily pissed off.  Otherwise, why bother?  Jay Pee

Anyone with a computer, a high-speed Internet connection and a half hour can find scores of videos like this one.  I found a really good one.  ABC national broadcast with Diane Sawyer.  It also highlighted an error at Walgreens, however, as you and I know, the problem is ubiquitous.  ABC named Kroger, CVS and others.  I could not copy ABC’s code to embed.  I wonder what the problem is?  Poorly trained techncians?  Absolutely.  We know that well-trained technicians make serious errors also.  Idiot pharmacists?  Probably not.  Pharmacists working too fast, multi-tasking?  Absolutely.

I did not have the time yesterday to showcase this letter in an appropriate manner.  I was on a schedule and had enough time to copy and paste.  The sentence that rang true for me was her criticism of the “financial bean-counters”.  I added the word “non-pharmacist” because they have just about ruined this industry by thinking they can throw money at every problem and save that money by ripping the skin off your backs.  I see a battle royal forming at Walgreens.  The non-pharmacist bean-counting Masters of the Universe are going up against a faction that seems to be highly invested in tying Walgreens name to the providing of professional services.   Cognitive services primarily.  It will be interesting.  Will the Masters keep in control until they kill the entire industry?  That paradigm is dead and they don’t even know it.

An Oregon comment.  If you have not read the recent article in “The Oregonian” (Oregon’s largest newspaper), scroll down.  The next shoe to drop will be the drive-through.  That is Jay Pee’s prediction.  There are already strong local forces with direct lines to the media who want drive-throughs banned.  If the Oregon BOP wants to stay consistent, they have to kill the drive-through.  Every pharmacist knows that selling prescriptions at the window is just that.. selling prescriptions.. The drive-through is just a cheap dispensary.  It is not possible to adequately live up to our duty to warn at the drive-through.  Think of this:  How can you counsel a young mother, wearing a wife-beater, with a tattoo of a penis-eating dragon on her left deltoid (I saw this a month ago) on her 3 year old’s first use of an abuterol MDI?  It is NOT possible.  In a case such as this, I have the technician politely tell the mother that she will have to come into the pharmacy so that the pharmacist can counsel her on her child’s medication.  If they resist, the technician has been told to give them a serious look and to say, “This very serious, ma’am.  You need to come into the store.  The pharmacist will not make you wait.”  So far, so good.

My compliments to the writer of this letter, for her courage.  I’d speculate that she has offered the view that is shared by thousands of WAG pharmacists.

This was sent to a lot of Walgreens email accounts today.

It addressed to the CEO.  It is hitting the fan.
Mr. Wasson,

As one of your fellow pharmacists, a customer, and a shareholder, I am
horrified by the direction Walgreens has taken under your poor leadership.
When he opened his first store, Charles Walgreen announced,“”We believe
in working, not waiting; in laughing, not weeping; in boosting, not
knocking and in the pleasure of selling products.”

That is no longer your philosophy. A good retail leader looks at both employees
and customers and tries to make the partnership workable and profitable.
Under your leadership, things have become progressively worse and there are
disturbing  internal issues threatening the integrity of my company.

Your patients are not safe in your pharmacies. A five-year-old in Nashville
was given the wrong medication in spite of the pharmacy manager earlier
asking for more staffing to address the stress levels. Under your
leadership, medication errors have killed four patients and cost
shareholders more than $61,000,000 in verdicts against you.

Throughout it all, your staff is burned out and stretched to the limit except you and your
board, sitting in comfortable chairs, calculating how many employees they
can afford to lose or how many patients can leave or die before things get
“serious.”

Let me assure you that we cannot consistently, efficiently and
effectively deliver prescriptions medications SAFELY under current conditions.
And while your latest victim was curled on the floor of his shower, dying
from a medication error, you rewarded yourself with a 36% raise.

That 36% raise also comes on top of Walgreens losing Express Scripts,
Anthem, Caremark, and soon Medco, and others, costing shareholders over
$6,000,000,000 in business. You are sadly willing to kiss off over billions
of dollars because other companies will not cater to you. What arrogance!

In front of the cameras, you tell pharmacists that there is no quota, there
is no pressure to rush through a prescription, but when the press leaves,
the pressure comes out to up the volume. Dollars cannot get into the cash
register fast enough to suit you, and there is absolutely no thought to
staffing needs, employee hours, or patient safety. Medication decisions are
not being made by pharmacists, they are being made by non-pharmacist financial
bean-counters. They take raw data and decide that two minutes is a safe
amount of time to fill a prescription from data entry to pulling the
correct medication and counting the pills to pharmacist checking and
counseling the patient.

You are a pharmacist. Can you even pretend that two minutes is adequate
time? When was the last time you actually set foot in a pharmacy, let alone
worked in one? You have traded in your lab coat for a three-piece suit,
wiped the dust off your feet, and never looked back to see how the company
functions – or fails to function. Who are you serving? Are you serving the
shareholders, who have suffered billions in lost business and wrongful
death lawsuits?

Are you serving the staff, who are burned out beyond functioning?

Are you serving your customers, many who have survived
medication errors – and some who have not?

I met you once – and I am sure you have no recollection of that meeting. I
was totally unimpressed with your lack of leadership. I asked a simple
question and you responded that you would have to get back to me. The same
is true for company meetings. You insist upon questions beyond provided in
writing ahead of time. Has anyone ever gotten a straight answer from you
without your handlers cuing the teleprompter? And how does someone run a
company with absolutely no knowledge of it?

Please do not try to pass this off with some pre-worded answer about
rewiring for growth. Anyone in business knows that successful growth means
more customers and more employees, not round after round of employee cuts
and customers taking their no-longer-accepted insurance plans to your
competition. The Pharmacy That America Trusts is quickly turning into The
Pharmacy That America Avoids.

You have brought the Walgreen family name down and have a moral obligation
to resign. You have cost people their beijing jobs, and you have put customers at
risk. Let someone lead the company who can bring employee morale to higher
levels, provide courteous service to customers, and grow the business as Mr. Walgreen
intended, treating customers with decency and fairness, not
passing off a cut-rate job in Beijing, and treating employees the way you would want
to be treated.
Sincerely,

Someone Who Cares

I honestly can say that I do not know what is going on in our industry.  I have a good idea, however.  What I smell is:

Panic Gloom Doom

Everything that the big drug store companies are doing lately indicate that they have run the course in the competitive paradigm that was designed in the 1970s and it is no longer working.  It has not worked for at least a decade.

They keep doing the same thing.  They throw money at the problem.  Coupons, gift cards.  They have been doing it for years.  Can’t they see that any competitive advantage they dream of is just smoke?

I will get to the point.  The non-pharmacist MBA bean-counting Masters of the Universe are out of their depth.   They are drowning.  An MBA is bred for two things:

Ferret out waste and design programs that stimulate growth.

They seem to believe that adequate staffing to give superior service is WASTE.

Growth?  Give me a break.  Any well-run business that provides prescriptions will grow.  It is a no-brainer.

The question I see is this:  What model will prevail?  The model that makes the provision of professional services important?  Or the model that is in place in most stores?  That is the one that is run by the metrics and patient safety be damned?

We are very quickly approaching a crisis point.  If our industry cannot fill and provide the crush of prescriptions that are coming, we will fail and “they” will take it away from us.  If we fail to provide those prescriptions in a manner that assures patient safety, “they” will take it away from us.  Most of us are caretakers of “Dispensaries”.   Nothing will change for you.  Some writers here claim that your wage will suffer.

We can begin to fix it by sending the MBA Masters of the Universe out to the variety store where they belong.  We can start creating a real pharmacy paradigm by giving PHARMACISTS a big say in the creation of pharmacy programs.

Am I dreaming?  Many of you are good drug store merchants, so don’t tell me that you could not come up with better programs.  You are pharmacists for crissake.  This is YOUR industry.

A CVS spokesman sent abc27 this response:
“CVS pharmacy is committed to the safe and accurate filling of prescriptions and we never compromise safety for speed. We utilize industry leading pharmacy systems and processes designed to enhance the safety of the prescription filling process.”
“Competent technician support has been an invaluable resource in all areas of health care, including pharmacy, for many years. Support offered by pharmacy technicians provides our pharmacists with more opportunity to focus on their licensed, professional duties. Our technician ratios comply with Board of Pharmacy regulations specific to each state. Nationally, we employ more than 22,000 pharmacists and 51,000 pharmacy technicians in our retail pharmacies.”
“Our training program for pharmacy technicians involves a rigorous curriculum designed to meet or exceed the standards of our state Boards of Pharmacy. Training methods include classroom instruction, self-paced learning and on-the-job training. We also support and encourage pharmacy support staff members to obtain National Certification through the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board.”

That is what CVS officially said for the article in the last post.  I have isolated it because I would like to know what CVS pharmacists and techncians have to say about this.  I have never worked for CVS.  I have no standing as a pharmacy professional who has actually had my feet on the floor in a CVS Pharmacy.

Things are moving very fast.  The momentum is building.  Like a snowball, it will get huge as it builds speed.  This one TV investigative reporter for ABC27 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is all over this and he will not stop with CVS.   Soon, like next week, other investigative reporters will want in because that is what they do.  What better story?  People put in serious jeopardy because of a huge corporation’s greed?

You drive this story.  You are the energy.  You are right in the middle.  Talk about it with your colleagues.  There is no stopping this.  As Oregon went, all states will follow.  I thought it would be a slow process, but I have changed my mind about that.  We are on the back of a major paradigm shift.  Ride it and ride it hard.  If you are going to assert yourself, please take baby steps right now.  Take ten minutes for an uninterrupted lunch break.  Stick with it.  Do not let your latent anger run you.  Be calm.  The last thing that will help is your righteousness.  I know you are right, but it is better to be slow as this develops.  Remember document everything.  Especially if a non-pharmacist store manager tries to give you orders.  A non-pharmacist is a nothing in the pharmacy.

This news story is from Florida, but links errors to stress.  It aired one month ago.

What the ….?  Did I read this correctly?  A technician explaining to a patient what the drug is for?  That would be in violation of the Pharmacy Practice Act in civilized states.  No matter.  A Pharmacist who tolerates a technician giving medical advice on prescription use needs to evaluate if he/she wants to continue making the big bucks.   When “they” downgrade your hong kong job from “pharmacy” to “dispensary”, you better have all your bills paid.  You might want to get out of the big house while you can and talk to your kids about public school.

Our own “Pharmacist Steve” is interviewed for this article.