Pharmacists walk out over increasingly unsafe work conditions
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- Опубліковано 31 жов 2024
- Pharmacy staff at some Walgreens stores are walking the job over what they call increasingly unsafe work conditions and it comes just weeks after a similar protest by workers at CVS. NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports for TODAY.
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#pharmacists #walgreens #health
It's time for a change, for patient safety, tech and pharmacist safety as well. Pharmacists have so much stress on them that they are in the top ten professions that will likely commit suicide. People who work in pharmacies do so much more than counting pills and putting a label on the bottle they deserve better! We need the piblic to recognize this too!
*thank you amen 🙏🏼*
STOP trying to force the pharmacy to support and make the entire store Profitable. Why are you closing stores? Corporate does Not understand the job responsibilities. Maybe some executives need to observe, question and understand the pharmacies requirements.
Amen 🙏 very well said
We are so understaffed people have no idea.
Facts I’ll
Get paid in xan bars lol
I have often wondered how many tasks Walgreens staff can complete. Drive thru Covid-19 testing? The containers had to be cleaned after each test dispensed. In the same container, our prescriptions come thru. They are sanitized I know.
Staff inside are providing vaccines and attending to 5 other functions. Pharmacists are filling prescriptions, answering questions, interacting on demand. This environment increases the risk of medical errors. Overworked is an understatement.
I work at a national long term care pharmacy doing business analytics, so I have no experience with actual pharmacy work. Meeting regulatory compliance, hitting productivity metrics like prescription filled per hour, dealing with customer complaints and questions, helping customers get their meds covered by insurance, and hearing customers that need meds and doesn't have the money to pay for them. In a retail pharmacy you are handling all those things and it can be emotionally and physically exhausting. I know the employees probably didn't take that decision lightly. Most pharmacist just want help people at end of the day and not deal with the business side or insurance stuff. Also, they develop deep and meaningful relationship with customers. Stepping away to make a point of the working conditions and knowing that it could impact patients service was probably tough for them.
Ultimately, this comes down to poor management and probably listening to shareholders/investors more than their employees. I hope everything works out for the employees and the customers.
Lotsss of Stresss!!!!
Well said!!! I don’t blame them for walking out. That’s the way I feel and I work in education!!!
Everybody is understaffed it’s not just healthcare. It’s also education as well. I’m thinking about quitting with being a teacher the pay isn’t nothing. I barely make enough to have my own place. I really hate this.
I absolutely agree with you!!! Even though it is rewarding to work in education, I’m starting to feel that it is not worth the emotional, psychological, and financial stress that educators have deal with on a daily basis!!!!
its understaffed on purpose. companies can increase staff they choice not to because it cuts into the bottom line.
Corporate executives above district management will keep pharmacies understaffed despite any lip service they give. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with their bonus programs. At Rite Aid pharmacy district managers are fired or demoted when they were brave enough to advocate for adequate staffing, They were yelled at and told they were not with the program. There was even a court case about this concerning a PDM being fired for this cause. Once all this blows over, it will be short staffed business as usual.
Well, besides corporate putting metric pressures, they also have to deal with customers that don't understand what the pharmacy staff are going through and are adding more to that burnout.
They can’t treat staff like that. They were told this. More than once.
Lots of stress!!!!
As they should! I worked there a couple months again and have never experienced such toxic work conditions. I walked out and never came back
Did you quit and have money saved up?
@@elonblake9141 like 3,00 which isn’t much in this economy. But even if you don’t have money saved stay until you find another job, then quit ASAP that’s what I would do for previous jobs I hated
Walgreens needs to adapt or die. Pharmacy hours get cut when side duties don't get completed, side duties aren't getting done due to understaffing. Great logic. The one I worked at didn't even keep the parking lot and side walks clear in winter. Definitely didn't feel like they cared much about worker and customer safety.
As for the parking lot, that wouldn’t be Walgreens issue, it would be the property’s landlord issue (most of all retail stores are on leased buildings/ property’s so it’s on the landlord to make sure it gets plowed as well as any maintenance issues with the buildings. All the stores can do is put in “tickets” for corporate to contact the landlord about it. But in the winter months I’m sure the landlord as a contract with a plowing company to take care of it during the day/night to come through every so often to plow and salt/sand the parking lots snd sidewalks. Never see the employees out there plowing or shoveling the parking lots, they’re too busy taking care of customers in the stores and such.
Seriously! Walgreens needs to change
Walgreens cut corners and got rid of the call center so now it created more and more work for pharmacist and pharmacy technician
I am pharmacist italiano...
Pharmacists need union.
Im a human rights educator amd yourh human rights educator Dr.Richard Demond Broussard
This day they continue cutting hours more and more for the techs, in other words they haven’t done squat of what they said they would do
Ummm. Conditions are bad for everyone who works in any line of customer service. The only time the horrible way we're treated by customers and employers is brought up is when there's a walk out, and even then, the scope is limited to specifically the positions that could afford to stage a mass walk out.
Talk about the cashiers. Talk about the stockers. Talk about the department workers and department heads being forced into working themselves to death and get told they're easily replaceable every single day.
Customers are getting worse and worse and worse and worse. We're all under staffed and under paid. We're all doing our best to do our jobs. Yet we're increasingly immensely under valued and under appreciated by both the companies we work for and the customers that shop at our stores.
You make excellent points, however, the reason why it is critical for pharmacists to not be overwhelmed and overworked pertains to the general population. Millions of Americans, including myself, take medication and giving someone the wrong medication could be a deadly situation if the pharmacists are burnt out🥺
Dollar tree employee murdered
Walgreen's sat on my son's prescription for 2 weeks! Then I go thru 4 days of withdrawals cause they didn't fill my stuff on time! Not cool. Even today, one of my son's scripts still isn't filled🤦🏾♀️ Time to find a new pharmacy.
The situation with your son sounds like it was an insurance issue. That is not the fault of the pharmacy.
Honest question - what does a Pharmacist do that can't be automated?
You are crazy. They are making sure that people don’t die.
In a retail setting? We lack the capability to automate all the things a pharmacist does.
Specific examples-
Giving immunizations, we don't have safe machines to mix, administer, and check and verify all appropriate immunizations the patient is getting that day.
2. Make a professional judgement call about what's reasonable for a patient's medicine-for example cross-sensitity for antibiotics, where a patient profile says allergic to penicillin and they get amoxicillin, pharmacist calls doctor to get new script, doctor states patient got amoxicillin in hospital, and patient was fine, just had diarrhea, pharmacist documents that and talks to patient, patient confirms they're willing to take amoxicillin since it's not a true allergy if it's diarrhea. Automating all that with a computer to talk to everyone in that process would be insane, and the more overrides you allow for automated safety systems the more you open up the risk for patients to get hurt when they don't understand risk.
3. Recognizing through professional judgment what drug interactions are serious, and which are just book interactions. Filling softwares automatically flag every drug interaction on file, and then the pharmacist looks to know if these are serious interactions that need documentation to proceed forward with dispensing, or if these interactions just require greater care when counseling patients.
4. Counseling patients- making sure people understand their medicine and it's side effects can't be automated, otherwise it would have been by now. Too much of the populace has too little understanding of health and medicine to standardize a robot to talk to them about side effects and what not to take. Then the patient has specific questions that you can't account for everything within the programming to have a good response, or good patient interactions. Look at robo phone lines to see a modern example of robotic interactions that are really difficult for people. Putting that as the last-line before a patient gets their medicine and potentially gets the wrong medicine, or doesn't understand how to avoid lethal side effects, or which side effects to look out for, will get patients hurt or worse killed.
There's a few of the really challenging things to automate just in a retail pharmacy setting. I'm not saying we'll never be able to automate things that pharmacist do, but currently we would need some high level AI capable of making complex and nuanced decisions for patient care while also staying as efficient as a human with processing multiple hundreds of prescriptions a day. And you'd need that at every store across the country before pharmacists would be useless. There's some other stuff I can think of too, but those oftentimes boil down to fixing other mistakes like how computers auto-fill prescriptions and get stuff wrong all the time or the doctor writes the script wrong, or in a way that makes the comuter not understand (writing "one" for the quantity of an inhaler when it's actually an 8.5gram weight inhaler, so that has to say 8.5 for quantity dispensed) but those types of errors could more easily be theoretically optimized so I just figured it'd fit the example to give the more difficult to optimize tasks as examples.
You can't be serious.
I wouldn't call this a safety issue. I would call this a staffing issue. Hire more people duuhhh. It's misusing the word safety. This is a stress issue.
But no I know companies like to squeeze as much as they can out of you. And I agree with the intention here. This is everywhere.
Dont let the hit u on the way out too your marathon .