Go as FAR as You Can

If you're a pharmacist or pharmacy technician, you know all too well that things don't go smoothly in the pharmacy.

Between the time a prescription gets dropped off and picked up a million things can go wrong. Most of the time everything flows perfectly from start to finish.

But not always.

Sometimes the patient's insurance information changes, which they often don't bother to tell you, or they don't have, or the drug prescribed isn't covered on their insurance, or you don't have it in stock... etc. etc.

And we deal with all of them, but what I'd like to complain about today are pharmacists and technicians that stop the process entirely when a problem is encountered and leave the label in the middle of the workflow process.

So I'm going to tell you, it's within the Spirit of the Pharmacist Code to take a script as far as you can in the workflow process to reduce work for someone else later.

Example:

A new prescription comes in for a patient unknown to the pharmacy via e-Script. You've never filled for that patient before. FILL THE SCRIPT for cash and take it all the way through the process to will-call. When the patient comes in they're likely going to show up at the pick-up window anyway. You can get payment information and send them on their way with less effort.

WHAT I REALLY HATE is when another pharmacist doesn't know the patient and just leaves it at the input computer. The patient comes in and FIRST I have to spend time just finding out that it's not even filled. It's really starting from the beginning, which is NOT good when the patient is there at the window with people behind them.

So really, dear pharmacist or technician, don't leave work for other pharmacists and techs to do. Move all the scripts through the process as far as you. Please.