Can someone please tell me why it takes two hours to take pills from a big bottle, and put them in a little bottle?
Thank you.
Often, there are many other things pharmacists also have to do, which either take priority or interfere with what they’re doing. IANAPharmacist, but I know a few. Here’s an interesting (and humorous) blog article on why it takes so damn long to fill a prescription.
ETA: shakes fist MsRobyn beat me to the punch. Shouldn’t have previewed. Oh well.
Ever think about what happens when they rush? It isn’t fuckin’ Wendy’s
In all seriousness, I once needed nine clindamycin capsules. Not eight, not ten, but nine capsules. With me so far?
The pharmacist didn’t know why I needed nine capsules, and he couldn’t understand why I needed nine capsules of clindamycin. So he called my doctor’s office for an explanation. My doctor wasn’t available, so the pharmacist waited for some doctor to pull my chart and get an explanation for why I needed nine clindamycin capsules.
I knew why, of course. I had a procedure scheduled, and I am group B strep positive, which means that I have to take an antibiotic the day before, day of and day after any sort of invasive procedure involving my girly bits. Nine capsules worked out to the three days’ worth, and I’m allergic to the standard group B strep preventative antibiotics, hence the clindamycin, which isn’t that commonly prescribed. So the pharmacist was genuinely puzzled, but couldn’t listen to my explanation; he needed someone with an MD or RN after their name. To find someone with those initials took approximately three hours; I went home and came back after the pharmacy called to tell me my prescription was ready. The total cost to me? Three bucks.
The punchline? The doctor called the prescription in, and it never occurred to the pharmacist to ask until he hung up the phone, by which time the doctor had left for his hospital rounds.
Robin
I can understand when they need to count the pills, verify everything, etc. and so forth. Now, what I DON’T understand is what the hold up with me getting birth control is.
The little pills come prepackaged in sealed boxes, three months to a bigger box. I get a bigger box. A bigger box that is also presealed (I can see it on the shelf back there). When I’m getting a refill, they literally only have to stick a sticker on the package and hand the stuff to me. Naturally, this doesn’t happen and I’m told I have to come back in 24 hours.
Makes no fucking sense to me. And no, they don’t have to have it shipped in from elsewhere, that’s just their standard protocol for birth control.
That is wonderful. I work in a drugstore (not the pharmacy part; I’m a cosmetician) and my husband is a pharmacy tech, so I was worried that the linked article would be something along the lines of “Because all pharmacists are baboons and hate you personally!”, but actually it was hilarious and dead-on. Also, in addition to all of the phone calls (and the ones that the pharmacists REALLY love are the ones where people could have easily used the automated menu to answer their question/ refill their prescription, but don’t bother for whatever reason) in some places the store or the state has rules that ONLY pharmacists are allowed to offer medical advice. Which means that if someone asks me whether Tylenol or Aleeve or Excedrin or Motrin or Whatever will work better for them, I have to take them over to the pharmacist. Yum.
What about an asthma inhaler? Take the box off the shelf. Put the box in my bag. No mixing, no counting. I’ll pay you for it.
So, did you want to wait on that or pick it up later?
Because everyone else who uses the pharmacy also needs their pills moved from the big bottle to the little one?
I understand that pharmacists have to put up with a bunch of crap and sympathize that their job consists of a lot more than just pouring from big bottles into little bottles. But . . .
I took my wife’s prescription for Vicodin (she’d just had surgery), waited the 40 minutes or so to get it filled, and brought it home where she immediately took one. About 15 minutes later I got a call from the pharmacy, breathlessly wanting to know whether my wife had taken any of her medication, and to immediately return it. It seems that rather than Vicodin, my wife had just taken someone else’s diuretic. Apparently the pharmacy was pretty rushed that day, and had somehow switched the labels.
This is not a rant about pharmacists, it’s really not. I’m not being sarcastic when I say I respect the profession. No real harm was done. But I see the pharmacist’s main job as correctly dispensing what was prescribed (if there were no errors in the prescription, of course). Speed is nice, but secondary. Needless to say, we switched pharmacies.
Because the big chain stores that have swallowed up all of the stand alone pharmacies would rather you spent more time wandering around the store putting high margin impulse items in your basket?
“One time I took a whole bunch of Vicodin and found out they’d given me a diurectic by mistake. Pissed doesn’t begin to describe it!”
What I always hated was this.
“Ok this will be 15 mins to fill”
“Great I’ll be back in 15”
15mins 10 seconds later
“Hey is it done yet?”
“15 more mins”
“Umm ok.”
25 mins later to give them leeway this time
“Hey is it done yet?”
“That’ll be 15 more mins”
“Ok”
finds a place to sit and watch them. Ten mins pass. They wander around in a seeming half daze for awhile. Counter girl finally gets nervous and goes and asks someone to fill my prescription.
“Ok here you go. Sorry about the wait”
Every damn time what annoyed me most was that this speed was the same if they were slammed and it was that speed if they were seemingly doing nothing but chatting and screwing around. (until I moved to England the local pharmacy is small and they pretty much get it in 20mins or they don’t have it and I have to come back tomorrow)
While we’re airing our gripes with pharmacies, I have something to add to the rather scant OP - I’ve encountered a lot of pharmacists (and pharmacy assistants) with pretty uppity, sometimes outright rude attitudes. I understand that they deal with a lot of crap, and that may party explain this attitude but for me it’s unwarranted and makes going to the pharmacy a generally unpleasant experience. Is there some kind of upscale pharmacy out there I can go to and be treated like a valued customer? (seriously)
I had the same complaint with the hormone patches. Don’t TELL me they’re in the back room cutting them out of a big sheet and individually wrapping them! Ditto on my husband’s foot cream and my osteoporosis pills. It’s off the shelf and into the bag stuff! Come ON already!
Fantastic. I’ll explain then to the 50 other people who have prescriptions due in the next 10 minutes why they have to wait for the pharmacist to verify your prescription. They must not be aware that there are a rash of Emperors of the World who just need Albuterol, or Yaz, so kindly get to the back of the fucking line.
Seriously though, I try to rush through that stuff that dosn’t take long to fill, but people shouldn’t think that a pharmacy is a fast food restaurant. There are other people who are waiting on medication, even if they aren’t standing in line right in front of you at that very moment, they’ve indicated that they want their stuff done by a certain time, so we try to accomodate everyone as well as we can. It’s not unreasonable to walk in and ask for something to be filled, and expect to wait a few minutes while it’s being put together for you. It is, however, unreasonable to walk in and expect that we have read your mind in the parking lot and knew that you’d want this medicaton filled, and have it counted out and waiting. On several occasions you have 10+ prescriptions that need to be typed, adjudicated through insurance (which often takes the most time), counted, labeled, and verified, which takes several minutes on top of the fact that there are most likely other prescriptions waiting in line. I’ve had people hand me a stack of prescriptions with 15 medications and expect to leave with them in 10 minutes. Sorry, that is not happening.
I’m amazed at how many people expect instant gratification from a pharmacy and then are shocked when mistakes happen more and more frequently. Does nobody really see the cause and effect here? Customers demand faster service, so corporate demands faster service, so even if it’s going to take 30 minutes + I have to assure you that it will only take 15 minutes even if that’s patently ridiculous. Corpo-pharmacy is not Mc Donalds.
It’s not just off the shelf and into the bag, people. Come on now. Be a little smarter than that. You all joke about how difficult it is to read a doctor’s handwriting, we’re just trying to make sure that what reads one thing isn’t intended to be something else so that we don’t kill you accidentally, all while you’re annoyedly tap-tap-tapping your foot at the register wondering what the holdup is.
In this world there are a lot of lazy idiots. These people frequently have jobs. Sometimes they have the unfortunate luck of working in a pharmacy, although typically they don’t last long. It’s not a testament to how a good pharmacy runs, or what a typical experience is, or for that matter that you have any idea the magnitude of stuff going on between the lines. But YMMV.
Read it the same way.
Why do doctors need to call through prescriptions over there?
Over here all docs have a standardised scrip pad, which fits into an inkjet printer and they print your scrip onto. You take it into the pharmacy and whatever’s printed is what you’re given by the pharmacist.
You’re in, you’re out in about 20 minutes max if there’s a wait.
I worked in retail pharmacy for a long time and we used to get this question. First off, if your pharmacy actually takes 2 hours to fill a routine prescription (birth control pill refills, things like that) you need to switch pharmacies. That’s ridiculous. I worked in a high volume store and unless a call was required to the doctor and they could not be reached, a prescription never took longer than 20 minutes to fill.
The general rundown of the process when I was in retail was this:
You drop off script, I confirm your address, drug allergies, name spelling, etc. I enter any changed data into the computer. (maybe 2 minutes at most)
Your drug order goes into the queue behind everyone else that is in the store waiting. There may be 0,5, or 10 people ahead of you.
Pharmacist enters the data from your prescription, double checking that it won’t interfere with anything else you take, verifying that all is well, blah blah. (About 2 minutes. )
Paper prints out with prescription data on it. Technician picks up slip, pulls drug off the shelf (confirming the NDC number so there are no drug errors), counts the drug (double counts if it’s a narcotic), labels the bottle, and puts it in the queue for the pharmacist to check it. (maybe 3 minutes or so).
Pharmacist checks the medication against the prescription, double checks the NDC against the label/bottle, opens the bottle to confirm that the drug inside is indeed the drug ordered, recaps it and signs off on the drug. Sticks drug in bag, staples patient information onto it and hands it out front to the waiting customer. (about 4 minutes)
So for us, it was roughly an 11 minute turn-around on prescriptions IF and only if there was no one ahead of you, the phone never rang, the pharmacist didn’t get called away by a patient with a question, and nothing needed to be mixed/taken out of the safe/other stuff only pharmacists were allowed to do.
If you had no people ahead of you, you were right in and out. If you had people ahead of you, the time where the pharmacist enters the drug and when they check it later are increased while they process other people’s stuff.
It takes a while, but trust me that you’ll be grateful when a pharmacist does what I personally witnessed: One pharmacist caught a lethal dose of an antibiotic that was written for an infant. Another caught a mix up (written by the doctor) where they put “Accutane” instead of “Accupril” (one is for acne, one is for high blood pressure). Those are just two examples of the mistakes that DOCTORS make and pharmacists find. It happens more often than you think.
I understand the “OMG GOD, just slap the label on and get me the hell out of here!” impulse. What people fail to get is that there are a lot of medications like that- estrogen patches, birth control pills, etc. You can’t just stick them ahead of the line and say “Oh, these are easy!” and fill them first. It’s first come, first served. Regardless if the item needs to be counted or not, they still all have to be entered into the computer (or refilled on the computer), filled in order, checked, etc.
So you can continue to think that pharmacies are stupidly run places (and many are, to be sure) but if that’s the case, it’s just like a doctor’s office. Shop around for the best service and price. A place that does the crazy wait game (10 minutes, 20 more minutes, blah blah) or that consistantly takes forever isn’t a good pharmacy.