CVS pharmacists, staff walk out in protest of ‘dangerous environment’ for patients
The COVID-19 booster rollout might be a bumpy one as local CVS pharmacy employees are planning another walkout this week.
Around a dozen CVS Pharmacy locations across the KC metro temporarily closed on Friday after pharmacists walked out citing staffing issues.
Patients should be prepared to wait– even after Wednesday– because pharmacists argue they can’t keep up with the demand for COVID and flu shots on top of filling prescriptions with their minimal staffing resources.
The CVS employees KCTV5 spoke with said ideally, they’d like 5-6 staff members to manage a pharmacy.
But, often, they just have one pharmacist and 1-2 technicians to handle filling prescriptions, answering the phones, managing the drive-thru, and now, administering both COVID-19 vaccines and flu shots.
One CVS employee spoke to us anonymously over fear of being fired for speaking out.
They explained their frustrations in a statement, saying “Pharmacists are reporting over 100 vaccinations scheduled for today with the worst being 15 appointments in a one-hour block.
With just one pharmacist on duty. An impossible ask to accomplish.”
A picture obtained by KCTV5 shows that the staff at one local CVS recently had more than 99 pages of prescriptions to be counted, verified, and given out. Employees say this adds up to being more than 1,200 prescriptions behind that day.
On the other hand, I checked a few Walgreens pharmacy locations and there were a lot of open times and dates. Like 35, 27, 18, 31 and 25 open time slots in the next 5 days.
I just got mine a couple days ago. No waiting, no crowds, no mad overworked staff. I made an appointment for the next day, had my pick of times, showed up, and was dealt with promptly. There was no evidence that HQ was handing out appointments in excess of their workload capacity.
I live in South Florida not too far from Fort Lauderdale.
A walkout happened at the CVS pharmacy near me several months ago. And when I went to Walgreens for a prescription last week, they looked way understaffed, with 4 different lines for in-store prescriptions, drive-through prescriptions, signing up for shots, and waiting for shots.
When I opened this thread, I was half-expecting it to be about pharmacists walking out because they refused to pollute patient’s bloodstreams with untested covid so-called “vaccines”.
I’m relieved to find I was wrong and that the pharmacists were asserting their need for more help to carry out boosters.
I switched all of my prescriptions and vaccinations to Vons or Rite-Aid a few years ago because CVS (in California) was always understaffed with long wait times.
The Mrs. and I got our covid/rsv/flu shots two days ago at a Walgreens, and it was mildly chaotic and delayed. The med/pharmacy tech told me the manager had called in sick, so he had to do all the vaccinations along with his usual other duties. We got our shots over 50 minutes after our scheduled time because the tech was required to drop the vaccine duties to check in a new shipment of pharmaceuticals which had just arrived.
Pharmacies are suffering from the same problems as the rest of our private medical systems: emphasis on profit and production over patient care and adequate staffing. Add to that a shortage of people qualified for the position and every day is a battle against both disease and chaos.
Pretty much the same with my SO: went from CVS to an independent pharmacy to Genoa Healthcare; now she’s back at CVS because they’re more reliable than the others. Especially Genoa, which screwed up some of her prescriptions.
I get my prescriptions at Hy-Vee, and got my flu shot at my doctor’s office on Tuesday.
CVS walkouts have been going on ever since CVS took over Osco in the 00s. I know of 4 cities (Quincy, Illinois; the Twin Cities, the Quad Cities of IA/IL, and Madison, WI) that saw 100% turnover of pharmacy staff after CVS took them over. More than one of the staffers who walked out, sometimes mid-shift which necessitated closing the store, had children in college, disabled spouses, etc. but they didn’t need a job badly enough to put up with those working conditions.
With the pharmacist surplus in recent years, CVS knows there’s fresh meat with 6 figures of student loans that they can abuse in similar fashion.
Walgreens is not far behind in this department, and always has been.
I had read about the walkouts, and took care to visit our local CVS to make sure that our upcoming appointments last Monday were not going to be affected. Our pharmacist assured me that they’d be on the job, and they were. Yes, the pharmacist and small staff looked harried and overworked. I feel bad for them and wish there was a way to contact corporate and put some pressure on them.
Interesting. In my province, and so far as I know in other Canadian provinces, a pharmacy has to be majority owned and operated by pharmacists, for just the reason identified in this thread: as health professionals, they need to be in charge of their service to their patients.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a mega-pharmacy, like Shoppers Drugs, where all the non-pharmacy parts are owned by a big corp; cosmetics, groceries, all the over-the-counter stuff. But the pharmacy portion has to be owned and operated by pharmacists.
The rule is similar in Luxembourg, where I live. The pharmacist is considered the operator of the pharmacy (with strict rules about how to become qualified as such). If you are certified as a pharmacy technician you can be employed by a pharmacy, but you have to be a true pharmacist to run one. And even then, the country strictly controls how many pharmacies can be opened, and where. Here is a sample article about a town seeking approval to have one; if they get the go-ahead, then they will recruit an aforementioned pharmacist to be in charge of it.
It’s noteworthy that pharmacies here are not like the big CVS-type “drug stores” in the US. It’s a small business narrowly focused on health care, without the endless aisles of shampoo and razor blades and makeup and candy and magazines and other stuff. Here’s a representative picture of a downtown pharmacy’s interior; they are rarely bigger than this, and often smaller.
The public shelves have things like bandages, baby-care products, dry-skin lotion, itch-relief cream, and such. They also have the benign painkillers for which no prescription is required, like acetaminophen, but they’re behind the counter and you have to ask for them.
Coming from the US, it did take a little getting used to, learning which storefronts carried which products (no more grabbing a bottle of Advil at the supermarket!), but we adapted. And we’ve learned that the pharmacists here are very knowledgeable and happy to be helpful when we have low-level medical questions, like suggesting an over-the-counter lozenge for a kid’s dry and scratchy throat.
The longer I spend away from the US, the more I look back at stories like the one linked at the top, and shake my head. The idea that pharmacists here would be so pressured by the profit motive that they have to actually close shop in order to call attention to the deterioration of health services is just unthinkable.
Anyway, I got my booster yesterday and there was no line for the shots. I had to wait until they thawed out a dose for me. So, I don’t think there’s excess demand for the new shot in Northern NJ.
One guy in front of me got a shot, but it must have been the flu shot or something, no waiting for the medicine to thaw.
Now, the pharmacy was super busy and overworked, but that was just with filling scripts.
(In case you’re curious, my arm is sore and I probably had a fever overnight, because I had some really strange dreams, but I feel fine now)
