Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Scheduling doesn't mean Scheduling

A recent email from the corporate office:

Pharmacy Teams,

Our scheduling department is getting overwhelmed with requests to cover regular staffing need shifts. Covering regular technician needs is not a responsibility of our scheduling department. The priorities of our scheduling department, in order:

1. Scheduling vacation needs for pharmacists
2. Covering sick call/emergency coverage for pharmacists
3. Covering technician approved vacations and FMLA

The email goes on to explain that it is your pharmacy's department job to staff the hours allotted for your prescription volume needs. If you need someone, YOU (the pharmacy) need to find someone by contacting the store manager for cross-trained employees, other Goofmart pharmacies, or interns in the area. Contacting the "scheduling" department is your last option with no guarantees.

Ironically, the last line of the email reads:

The most important thing is that we have enough staff to meet the needs of our patients/customers.

So let me get this straight...

"Scheduling" doesn't handle scheduling, at least not when it is the busy flu season. In that case, it's up the the busy pharmacy with extra flu shot volume to find someone to work if a technician doesn't show up.


So when I don't have a technician show up (like last week when I was buried with new prescriptions and had a long line of people waiting for flu shots) I'm supposed to take the time to call around to other stores to try to find someone myself, OR I'm supposed to call the front end store manager to ask for a cross-trained employee (which we don't have ~ and quite frankly, I've never heard of any Goofmart Grocery which has a cross-trained employee).

Why? Because our "scheduling" department doesn't handle "scheduling."

Shouldn't the flu season increase in volume be part of the "regular staffing" needs? After several years of giving flu shots, shouldn't the company have a clue that we need more technicians this time of the year? Isn't that a regular staffing need? 

What it really amounts to is that all the pharmacies are seriously understaffed and Goofmart looks at a situation like this as a revenue windfall on the backs of the pharmacists having to go it alone in the pharmacy. Patient safety be damned, man! We're talking money, you fool!

What a complete load of crap from a company run by imbeciles! Shame on you, Goofmart Pharmacy. Shame on you.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think I might know what the root of the problem is, but first a couple questions:
1. Are you a responsible employee who does your job?
2. Do you, no matter how much bullshit they throw at you, have your tasks fulfilled by the end of the day?
3. On an average day do you single-handedly complete the work of more than one person?

If you answered yes to those questions then it is YOU, CrazyRxMan who is the problem.

I used to be the problem at my last job before I resigned and gained some small amount of my sanity back. It is people like this who lead companies to think that they can overwork us, because we are efficient and competent and we can "handle it". We might not outright say that we can handle it, but they try it once or twice and see that everything gets done and assume it's fine to make this a normal regimen.

It's the ones who always bitch and whine to corporate, the ones you and I look at and think they are lazy and not wanting to do their fair share, the ones we work circles around who are actually right. If we all acted like that then maybe something would change, but we don't and they know it. They know if we complain then there's always someone else waiting to fill our position who won't... for a while at least.

Now it's a vicious cycle that is impossible for one person to break. But it was people like us who, in the beginning, made things the way they are now. The vultures took advantage of someone who simply had good work ethics and was trying to do their best and this is what we have now.

Anonymous said...

Very good response above. Absolutely correct in every way. There will always be someone to step in and 'give a shit' about the job. I take the abuse and humiliation for $60/hr. I would rather be tortured but I can't find anyone hiring.