And another. Longest I’ve ever waited was about 10 minutes. This afternoon it took 3 mins.
And my local pharmacy has a robot with a pill chute which is awesome.
Medical profession protectionism + Incentive to make you wait around so you browse the store’s aisles some more = wait.
At my local pharmacy, many of the folks behind the counter recognize me by name and it rarely takes longer than 5 -10 minutes to get my prescription filled if I am dropping it off right then. Even less if I have called it in ahead of time.
And it’s a pharmacy chain.
I get my pills in allotments of 180 for a month, and they are not small pills. I would need a mule to haul them out of there if they were in foil packs.
I don’t see how it’s possible that having a tech count pills from a large bottle then having the pharmacist also count them – and having to purchase, ship, and store a large number of assorted empty bottle could be more cost effective than for the store to buy pills that have been counted and packaged by a machine doing several hundred or several thousand per minute.
If the cost of the machined packaged pills is indeed higher than the cost of hand-counted when the labor cost is included … something wrong with the picture … higher cost, slower service, more prone to errors … hmmm … so why do they do it that way in the USA? … somewhere in there somebody somehow is managing to make more money than they would by doing it the right way.
it’s not - it’s an excuse to justify/maintain the role of the pharmacist.
A few years ago, I filled a prescription at a pharmacy where I had some insurance information on file, but I knew going in that I would not be covered*. I told the tech in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS not to file a claim because it WOULD BE DENIED, and that I would pay cash, and then told them that I would be hanging around the area and would be back in 20 or 30 mins or so to pick it up and pay cash. I then wandered to a nearby store at that mall for a little bit. I then got a phone call on my cell phone from the pharamacy, telling me that my insurance claim had been DENIED and what do I want the pharamacy to do about it.
I went back to the pharmacy to tell them about their problem in following instructions, and was told off and told that their procedures do not permit bypassing insurance on file such as I had requested, and that in order to not file a claim, I have to formally request my insurance information be removed from my file.
I thought about filing a privacy violation lawsuit, but decided it wasn’t worth it.
Stupid pharmacies.
*(I think my insurance may have been expired)
South African here - although we have a state sponsored healthcare system, anyone who can afford to will generally choose a private medical aid scheme. If I have been to a particular pharmacy before, they will have my details on file, and filling a prescription will take 5 min unless there is a problem (out of stock, can’t read the doc’s handwriting, etc).
I had this same question the other day when I went to the pharmacy. I read the post linked in the earlier part of the thread and I get it, but this is the way it went down. I went to the doctor and got my prescription for the same antibiotic I have had the last four times for an upper respiratory infection. I took this to the exact same pharmacy and waited on them to open (I was 10 minutes early) and as I handed it to them they explained it would take about 20 minutes. Not so bad, I guess. I wandered over and sat down on the bench nearby. 20 minutes later, no medicine. 40 some minutes later, I walked up to the counter and asked for my meds again. They explained it would be ready in just a minute, but I watched as the lady walked over, picked up the pre-packaged six pills I needed, placed the label on them, stapled them inside two different bags, put them in a hanger bag, walked back over and asked what my name was again, got them back out of the bag, and handed them to me. I’m not sure why this would take so long, but apparently it does.
This is the same pharmacy where I may call in a prescription at noon and they say it will be ready in an hour, leave my house and get there by 1:15 (it is near my doctors, which is rather far away) and when I get there they will say it will take an hour. This seems to be a common thing, and my assumption is that it takes two hours to prepare prepackaged pills because they wait till you show up to start, not when you call in the refill. This gives a buffer of time where they assume that because you are stuck there anyways, you will go shop. If there is a reasonable explanation of why call in refills never are ready when you get to the store, I’d love to hear it, but more and more I hate going to the doctor because I hate dealing with all the sitting at the pharmacy afterwards. It takes less time to drive to the doctors office, be seen (after waiting) and drive to the pharmacy than it does to sit in the front and wait on my pills. My insurance company keeps offering mail order crap so I don’t have to deal with this, but the program seems pretty much only for maintenance drugs (my inhaler) and not one-off drugs (antibiotics and whatnot).
Brendon Small
Brendon Small
The CVS in my area has 5 or 6 people running around and it takes forever to do anything. The Walgreen’s across the street has 2 or 3 people and is more sedate, yet they’re much faster.
You’re still missing the most important reason:
Pharmacies are in retail outlets that sell much more than prescription and OTC medications. These retail outlets virtually (or possibly actually) mandate that there’s a wait long enough for someone to buy more stuff.
Post #42 didn’t miss it! 
I’ve really never had a problem at Walgreens. Script get’s called in, faxed in, refilled over the internet or dropped off, and it’s always ready when they say, usually about an hour. The only time I’ve ever had to wait is when I had a doctor prescribing me 180 Adderalls per month. It usually took them some extra time since they almost always called the doctor to double check that since that was a ridiculously high amount.
Mea culpa, and sorry it took so long to admit it. Haven’t been online much today.
This is the most misinformed garbage I have ever heard regarding pharmacists. Do you really think that a pharmacist, working for a chain drug store, and not making a single cent off of any OTC (or prescription products for that matter - we don’t work on commission, we are salaried) wants to put up with a lobby full of angry customers who are very vocal with their displeasure at waiting for anything just so the store can sell another bottle of Advil? Quite the opposite, at Walgreens, for example, prescription fill time (as well as phone hold time and anything related to customer service) is tracked rigorously and recorded - most of the training and quality improvements in a retail pharmacy go to trying to decrease wait times. If the pharmacy pisses you off so much because of wait times, then you won’t come back again, and you won’t spend as much money in the long run. Your whole argument is illogical.
Also, you may not feel that there is a need for pharmacists and that is your prerogative. Pharmacists are an integral component of the health care team and work closely with physicians and nurses (not just in community pharmacies, but also in almost all health care settings). I am not about to justify my profession to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about it, but think about it this way: when you are about to put something in your body that could potentially kill you, wouldn’t you want to have someone who has the knowledge and training double check everything first? (or you could look it up yourself on Wikipedia and see what happens).
And what do they base that determination off of, exactly? Do they run some chem lab tests? No, the computer tells them.
You have your place - it’s just not counting out pills. Don’t be so sad.
I can’t speak for all chains/pharmacies, but as a pharmacist manager, I can guarantee that the company I work for has never mandated any such thing, at least not to us managers.
I don’t have a horse in this race, and I don’t know anything about the pharmacy business. But I’m having a hard time making sense of this. It seems that the parties who would be responsible for putting in pill counting machines would either have a disincentive to keep pharmacists in work, or at worst they’d be neutral.
The vast majority of pharmacies in the US are owned by massive corporations. Those companies would, I am absolutely sure, be thrilled if they could find a way to get rid of pharmacists. Pharmacists are expensive employees, and probably higher maintenance than average too (e.g. more likely to complain about procedures they disagree with). If a pill counting machine could do away with pharmacists, or even reduce reliance on them, I’d expect CVS and Walgreens to be all over it.
If it’s illegal to let pills be counted by machines (like I said, I don’t know anything about this), the government regulators who could change that law are beholden to their constituents, but more so to lobbyists. Surely the retail/chain pharmacy lobbys carry far more clout than the pharmacist lobby. As for the constituents, only a tiny percentage are pharmacists or care about pharmacists. The rest probably don’t give a damn how the pills are counted, but they might be happy to have their prescriptions faster and/or cheaper if a machine could provide that.
Finally, the pharmaceutical companies may have a part to play (e.g. packaging pills in a way that makes them easier to use with counting machines). I can’t see them really caring either way. If they were to take a side, it seems far more likely that they’d side with the retailers (in favor of the machines) than the pharmacists. The retailers are the ones who choose what to carry, how much they’ll pay for it, etc. They have a much larger impact on the pharmaceutical company’s success than the pharmacist does.
So where does this conspiracy come from? Who both has an incentive to keep pharmacists in the picture and also has the power to prevent pill counting machines from being put into place?
In a community pharmacy setting they go by the information available to them - the patient’s previous medication history and any information the patient or physician provides them. Then they do run a drug interaction screen through the computer, and using their professional judgement, filter out the clinically significant interactions from non-significant ones.
In a hospital setting, we can and do run “some chem lab tests”. We are able to adjust a drug or dosage and make recommendations to physicians as to what is appropriate in a given patient based on their liver and kidney function and other pharmacokinetic profile. Drug-drug interactions can be fatal, especially with intravenous meds. If you’ve ever been a patient in a hospital you’ve had a pharmacist working behind the scenes to optimize your drug therapy and make sure you don’t get overdosed (or underdosed) and we do a lot of that by ordering and looking at labs.
It is absolutely not illegal to let pills be counted by machine. Pharmacists love having medications already pre-packed in 30 count bottles or unit-dose measurements. It saves time and also cuts down on errors. However, I believe it saves some money for the drug store to buy in bulk, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. There are alternate suppliers which will pre-package drugs for you, but they charge a premium. I think you guys are making way too much of the “pill-counting” issue. It makes up a very small bit of the whole equation, and besides, most pharmacies have some form of automated pill counters available (Baker cells or cassettes, Parata machines, tablet counters).
Pharmacies are generally within retail outlets in Britain too, and, I expect, most other countries, but people in Britain and Israel etc., are typically getting their new prescriptions in five minutes or less, whereas in America it is taking 20 minutes at a minimum, if you are lucky.
So no, that is not the most important reason (if it is even a reason at all).
I’m in the USA. For prescription refills, I just click “refill” on the web site, then drive by. I don’t even park, just drive up to the window. They hand me the drugs and I hand them my credit card. They hand me a receipt and I drive away.