Doing the right thing, even when its the hard thing.
We have a urgent care clinic fairly near our pharmacy. For the most part, they write for the Blue-Plate special: antibiotics, pain meds and cough syrups. Its been open for less than a year. As every pharmacist knows, urgent care clinics can attract some seriously sketchy folks looking for a new ears to hear their sorry lies. Since its a pretty small operation, we can usually call and get the dr on the line if we need to “confer”. Today was such a day.
Mr. Clean-cut-nicely-dressed handed me a one of the clinic’s rx’s. Now, I can’t speak for all pharmacists but most of us have a pretty strong 6th sense when something doesn’t seem right. A dead giveaway for me was when he quickly (a little to quickly) announced “I’ve been here before and I am paying cash for these”. He had scripts for an NSAID and a C-II narcotic. I looked at his profile and the same pair of rx ’s has appeared from same clinic 3 additional times. We had insurance on file for him.
I decided to diss his request to “pay cash” and thought I’d run his insurance to see if my intuition was right on. The NSAID went thru fine….the C-II rejected: filled yesterday, someplace else. Intuition:1 Customer:0
Hmmmm Pharmacy Chick wondered if the Dr at the urgent care clinic was in on that bit of information, so we rung him up. Dr didn’t know (duh) and cancelled the C-II, which left me with the rather dicey duty of telling this guy that all he was going to get was the NSAID.
I decided to play it cool and called Mr Nicely dressed back over. My hands were a little shaky and it wasn’t the caffeine from my coffee. I told him that I saw we had insurance on file for him and wanted to save him money. I was hoping that he wouldn’t get pissy if he knew he was busted, but was spared embarassment. I explained that when the pain med rejected, we had to call the doctor for further advice, and in doing so, the Dr. cancelled the prescription. I could see his jaw tighten when I asked him if he had this drug filled yesterday, but he admitted to me that he had. (I wish I had a blood pressure and heart rate monitor on him–or me for that matter– right then).
He took the NSAID, and I highly doubt that neither Mrs Chick or the Dr. will be seeing him anytime soon.
You know, I didn’t take a lot of pleasure in doing this. In fact, there was a moment when I truly considered doing the easy thing and just filling it, knowing full well what he did yesterday. But I also know that I would be feeding a multi-headed monster, one head being his drug problem, and one head being my apathy at not doing the right thing. It would have been easy to rationalize: it was just 15 tabs, it WAS a legit script (until I called the office to confer), it would have been a decent profit on about $.50 cents worth of inventory, and I wouldn’t have to worry about getting my head ripped off. However, I would also be compromising my ethics, something I have always felt was was important in my practice. If I lose my ethical practice of pharmacy, I lose my credibility in my own mind. I would have sold out. I am not ready to sell out. I may not be popular with those “sketchy folks” ,and I might risk an unruly customer, but I will go to bed at night with a clean conscience.
So if you read this and nod your head and think “yea, I’ve been there”, I’d love to hear about it.
Tags: customers, ethics, law, pharmacy life | |