The Pharmacy Chick

Comment by The Ole' Apothecary

June 20, 2009 @ 7:40 am

Oddly enough, PC, this incident you described is the most important thing I’ve read about retail pharmacy on the blogs this year. It has to do with the lack of common courtesy afforded our profession by other healthcare professionals, combined with the fact that we seem to have little or no recourse to remedy the situation. To whom to we complain? The doctor? The Board of Medicine? Barack Obama? How does our profession earn the most basic respect?

It is because we don’t demand that respect. If I bring the wrong paperwork with me to a lab as a patient, I have to go back to the doctor to get the right paperwork. What if the pharmacist simply let this nitrofuran prescription back up? LET the patient come in and tell her we can’t fill it, and to go back to the doctor. But, no–out of force of habit, we allow ourselves to get walked on. I wonder if the physician’s agent (could be a high school kid for all we know) would have also called the patient about it if the error hadn’t been caught right away.

Perhaps we have been hobbled from demanding respect because we are uaually employees, not independent practitioners. I wonder if the independent pharmacies can stand their ground, or if it all falls to the “competition.”

Comment by chris

June 22, 2009 @ 5:38 am

We had a prescription come in once for a new patient, for a maintenance drug not normally asociated with allergies, so i didnt ask that specifically. After I had given out the medication, the doctor from a few doors away(himself not the reception staff) came running in asking if we had seen the patient yet as he had just found a note from the hospital of an anaphylactic reaction to this medication. He asked if it had been given out and why we didnt catch it. It was a new patient so we obviously had no record of the reaction. This was a serious event that had reached the patient, and the doctor wanted to blame us. Thankfully the patient had just signed up to our collection service and had left a cell number. We got in touch and were able to prevent a problem.

You’ll never guess who got shouted at and official complaint made by the patient. It was us

Comment by Kelly

June 24, 2009 @ 7:26 pm

I want you to know that there are people out there who appreciate the phone calls from the pharmacist when they notice a drug interaction.

I have had several situations where a new patient has come in to our office and neglected to tell us that they were on a certain medication. For example, the doctor prescribed Trileptal for the patient. The pharmacist called me and said that this patient was also taking Reglan. I was so thankful that this pharmacist has called me.

I have patients that get mad when we change their medication (i.e., from lorazepam to clorazepate) and they discover that I have called the pharmacy to tell them to cancel any remaining refills on the medication that the patient was told to stop taking. I usually tell the patient that they have chosen to see a doctor who has a staff that actually checks their file, communicates with the pharmacy and is a “drug nazi” when it comes to prescriptions. LOL

And, whenever I send a RX vis eScript that I had to cancel…I always make sure to call the pharmacy and tell them about it. It’s just common sense.