A Female WAG Pharmacist and WAG Shareholder lets loose.
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
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FYI. This wasn’t me. On that note this guys got balls! I’m glad he pointed out the 36% raise when most of us got $O.25/hr. I miss this in my email this morning, maybe it was yanked by IT. . Thanks for sharing Jim!
Boy–this guy sounds p.o.’d I recently retired fromn CVS so I am aware of some of the conditions he speaks about. The CEO’s are in a very tight spot. They have to do more with less, up the profits while lowering the expenses. They do this by forcing efficiencies on the ranks causing burnouts, etc. but they hope the fittest will survive. Wasson deserves a good salary for having to do all of this but I think that overall, CEOs in corporate America and their upper staff people are still way overpaid. Bonuses are paid out even if performance decreases. What kind of American are we taling about?
You mean the repeated WAG emails stating that we need to put our patients in a caste system and treat those who “spend” more at the pharmacy better are misguided?
Say it isn’t so!
Is this letter for real? The same could be said about other major chains (perhaps in exponential terms). Norm, you are much too kind in your assessment of CEOs. There is no limit to the human toll when it comes to the “metrics”. Can’t fill a prescription in less time than it takes for chicken McNuggets? (Sorry, McDonalds!) Not answering the phone in 3 rings? (The list goes on…) You will be replaced faster than you can say ‘five waiters in the queue.” The risk to the public of this need for speed goes without saying. How about the risk to the “dispensers”? Do they yell at their spouses? Kick the dog? Take refuge in self medication? Fall into the abyss of depression? I wish someone would do a study on that!
Newsflash: this was written by a woman. Why must it always be a man?
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Because most “commenters” here are men. Also, there was ambiguity. The name of the “writer” and the e-mail address were
both, male and female. I stand corrected. Women are the majority of new RPhs. Women can drive this profession and industry (they are different) if they want to take the lead. Jay Pee
I worked at the amazingly stultifying WAG corporate headquarters in Deerfield IL, where people waited for others to die so they could get a promotion. I met Charles Walgreen the younger, who was extremely nice, not a pharmacist, stuck in a really crappy job there, and quit to live off his inheritance. I left after 10 months because I was so profoundly bored, and he left his junkie wife. That crappy company wouldn’t give employees more than a 10% discount, not including prescriptions, and the benefits sucked too.
I don’t condo what is being done.. but.. tried to explain WHY IT IS HAPPENING…
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http://healthblog.steveariens.com/?p=1277
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strange as this may sound.. I wrote this WEDNESDAY NIGHT – TWO NIGHTS AGO…
Wassan and a bunch of the other higher ups at WAG have decided that this year, they are taking their bonuses in cash rather than the usual stock options. What does this say about what they think about the long term viability of WAG?
WAG is just like any other large retail pharmacy chain- under pressure to make quarterly earnings targets. They don’t see their business as any different from any other retail business. They look at metrics such as same store sales to evaluate pharmacies. Customer service is an afterthought at best. And because there is no accountability for the company if something goes wrong, there is no incentive for them to actually do the right thing and staff their pharmacies properly. After all, if a misfill happens it will be the pharmacist on duty who is held responsible. Accountability needs to shift back to the employer. Until that happens chains will be free to do whatever they want.
There is an alternative explenation, and that is the stupid doctors writing a dosage 5.0 instead of 5.
Why the hell doctors write .5 instead of 0.5 so everybody could misread it as 5, and on the othe hand they write 5.0 instead of 5 so everybody could misread it as 50.
Who the hell tought them to write that way?!
If you want a media response from this letter, you will have to forward links to this site to media (newspapers, magazines) and ask them for a comment to it. If they get enough requests, they WILL publish it and Walgreens will be forced to respond. Just sayin’.
I read a financial article recently the stated that since John Standley, CEO and Chairman of the Board at RAD, met the EBITDA goals for the past fiscal year he would be receiving a roughly 300 percent salary increase. His salary will increase from $2.8 million/year to $11 million/year. That’s right. He did not increase profitability, increase cash on hand, decrease debt, etc. He simply “met expectations”. I, on the other hand, received an “exceeded expectations” upon my yearly review. I will be waiting patiently for my 300 percent salary increase.
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“Redheaded” was absolutely correct. We work in retail. The corporations have numbers to meet, shareholders to appease. As far as Wall Street is concerned, WAG is no different than Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, or Toys R Us. We simply sell a different product. “And because there is no accountability for the company if something goes wrong, there is no incentive for them to actually do the right thing and staff their pharmacies properly. After all, if a misfill happens it will be the pharmacist on duty who is held responsible. Accountability needs to shift back to the employer. Until that happens chains will be free to do whatever they want.” Perfectly stated! NOTHING will change until responsibility is forced onto the corporations. Now, they are simply able to buy themselves out of any problem. Individual pharmacists are stuck in limbo. We carry all the responsibility but we have no autonomy. We are expected to adhere to ALL the laws while the companies we are employed by pick and choose which laws they want to follow, seemingly immune to any and all repercussions should something terrible happen.
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All this sabre rattling from Oregon and this WAG pharmacist is great, but will it accomplish anything? States can pass all the laws they want (look at all the “laws” governing retail pharmacy on the books in NC)but until they actually “enforce” these laws they are nothing but paper tigers. I’ll stick with guarded optimism for now.
@slave2000.. yes, WAGS… is no different than Macy’s…Toys-R-US .. in regards to the stock market.. in regards to the market place… Macy’s and Toys-R-US don’t have a third party telling them how much they can charge for their product and when you will get paid for what you have sold… like the PBM’s and the insurance companies do..
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In regards to NC BOP and their unwillingness to enforce their practice act… I can understand why a mid-30′s RPH does not want to file complaints with the AG’s office or take them to court…for fear of repercussions… isn’t it a shame that one has to fear the bureaucrats that are suppose to regulate your profession/industry.
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My money is that one of these BOP’s is going to try this trick on someone at the end of their career.. and they won’t fear the consequences of taking them to court or filing complaints with the AG’s office.
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They are retired or ready to retire.. and keeping/losing their license probably doesn’t mean all that much… besides it would take 2-3 yrs to work it way thru the initial part of the court system.
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and while the BOP’s may act stupidly at times… I don’t believe that they are stupid enough to take actions against a RPH’s license… while the RPH has them in court over not enforcing the practice act.
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On the other hand.. the BOP’s are so poorly funded that they don’t come looking for trouble… hell.. look at NC.. they can’t even handle it properly when trouble comes looking for them and it is in their face..
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The BOP’s started getting flooded with letters of concerns over patient safety issues from RPH’s.. they have to keep those letters – they are discoverable via the court system…
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I wonder what would happen to that RPH in Nevada… who is before the BOP over a mistake – made by a tech… if the BOP’s files were full of letters of concerns from CVS RPH’s expressing concerns about patient safety, staffing issues and medication errors. His attorney could request all those letters and present them at his hearing… the BOP still might not do anything to CVS… but.. they would be hard pressed to do anything against the RPH.. when they have all those letters.. they have chose to ignore.
I have said many times before, on this forum, that this battle is not for the younger pharmacsists to fight. It is unfair to expect 20-30 something pharmacists to sacrifice their careers to fight for change. This is a battle for the older, wiser, well-respected pharmacists with nothing to lose. The pharmacists people will listen to because they’ve seen the changes over the years and experienced the decline of patient safety for the past 3+ decades. JP, Pharmaciststeve, Peon, you are the ones that should be/are leading the charge for change.
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We need to be realistic with our expectations for this profession. Things may not ever change. What we need is a clear cut job classification. Pharmacists can not be “employees” and “autonomous medical profesionals” simultaneously. We can not be one or the other whenever it best suits the corporations agenda. If we are going to be employees, then we deserve to be treated fairly and protected as all other employees of large companies are. That means limiting individual pharmacists’ liability and forcing the corporations into taking responsibility.
@slave2000… we now have a 60 y/o taking on CVS in PA… with a whistle blower case… there is state/regional media already involved and a couple of national reporters gathering information.
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BTW… it has been reported that the 61 y/o RPH/DM for the CVS involved in this whistle blower lawsuit… and who was named in this lawsuit…. abruptly retired last Saturday… go figure…
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Personally, I only work for temp agencies.. so.. I am not privy to a lot that is really going on … JP.. just works two days a week and Peon doesn’t work for CVS or Rite Aid.. IMO… the two easiest targets.
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I am aware of some RPH’s in those chains that are gathering documentation… IMO.. it may be just a matter of time…
pharmacyslave2000, it is everyone’s fight, regardless of age.
Walgreens is going down. It is sad what has happen. I am just a MGT. The silence when they came from me from the other workers was sad that no one spoke up, but now they are coming for you. But now no one is left to speak up for you.
Thank you for posting this Jim. I began at a Walgreens with a 2 lane drive through. I often spent large chunks of my 8-10 hour day with a phone clutched between chin and shoulder trying to keep the constant line of cars moving. I often went home feeling like a failure for not being able to keep up with this melee. After years of constant neck pain from their lack of headsets like any decent fast food chain has for their staff. I worked fast food jobs in high school, and I can say that most walgreens pharmacies keep less staff on the roster than your average Burger King.
i’m almost glad I was ‘dismissed’ when i was for trumped up issues… even after I was gone I promoted this company to others as a good place for a career despite what happened to me personally…. but now seeing the direction this company is heading it makes me sad…. Walgreens used to have a passion for providing care and customer service but now with many many friends still in the company at high levels I see a shift to only caring about dollars and cents…. don’t you white collar never work a weekend or holiday never sacrifice a minute of your own life realize that if you continue to provide exemplary levels of care and service your bottom line will continue to rise? so keep on turning into CVS and see what happens while your stores close across America…. smooth move for the shareholders…. I’m sure they’ll be pleased watching their profits sink…. cut a few more positions and hours…. Walgreens is fast becoming the Pharmacy America laughs at…. shame on you!