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When you are dealing with 60 or 90 pills how do you do count them? Spill them all out on the counter? {Eww} Bring a paper towel with you to count them on?
I used to bring along an envelope, poured the pills into the envelope, and counted them one by one back into the bottle. If I came up short I'd invite the pharm tech, or someone there, to recount with me.
Incovenient, disruptive to all, for sure. But keep in mind MY inconvenience at being chronically shortchanged my cardiac meds. I wouldn't have needed to count my meds like that if the personnel had taken pains to ensure I (and other customers, I'm sure) I got the entire number in the prescription.
Labor Bloat keeps people busy busy busy. Half the labor force can produce all the consumable goods and services. The other half conforms with government regulation or litigation avoidance.
US paper consumption has increased since the computer era, and over 95% of printed material is never looked at, after paid workers printed and stored it. What do you think millions of people are "producing" in cubicles in all those 50-story skylines owned by banks and insurance companies? Work that didn't need to be done 50 years ago when there were no skylines..
Same bloat labor being done at your pharmacy while you wait. The place where you get a glimpse of the emperor wearing no clothes.
If "counting" pills is what slowing the line down, my bank has machine money counters. Surely, a reliable machine can be made that will count pills for decades without ever making a mistake.. Or humans can be taught to count pills in less than six years with periodic refresher courses. And maybe, with experience, achieve the astounding speed of several hundred pills per hour.
There is no such thing as multitasking. It's a myth. It's humanly impossible to do more than one thing at a time. People think they do, but they don't. In fact, when you try multitasking, you're actually more inefficient than when you do a series of tasks sequentially. If an employee is trying to answer the phone and filling a pill bottle with medication simultaneously, what they are actually doing is shifting their attention and brain capacity from one task to another and back again. They listen to the customer's question, try to answer it, fill a few pills in the bottle, then switch their brain back to the customer's question. In so doing, they are wasting milliseconds or seconds refocusing their mind from one job to the other. Back and forth back and forth. Not only does it take longer, they are more likely to make mistakes on both tasks. The problem is multiplied if they are trying to do more than two tasks at "once."
Nope sorry I worked as a pharm tech for several years. You can wait on more than one person at a time. When the DT is waiting for their order to finish you can help the front counter. People just don’t know how to think anymore.
I used to bring along an envelope, poured the pills into the envelope, and counted them one by one back into the bottle. If I came up short I'd invite the pharm tech, or someone there, to recount with me.
Incovenient, disruptive to all, for sure. But keep in mind MY inconvenience at being chronically shortchanged my cardiac meds. I wouldn't have needed to count my meds like that if the personnel had taken pains to ensure I (and other customers, I'm sure) I got the entire number in the prescription.
I would politely tell you to take your business elsewhere.
I would politely tell you to take your business elsewhere.
Wait a minute. In this hypothetical situation, you would tell a customer that you just made a huge mistake on to go take her business elsewhere? Well, that’s just wrong.
I would politely tell you to take your business elsewhere.
LOL, Mike, if you treated me the way I was treated in that CVS, you wouldn't need to tell me to take my business elsewhere, I'd leave and never darken your door again.
But... I felt the need to count my pills in front of them because they had shortchanged me by several pills on a number of occasions. As in, getting 27 pills instead of 30 in a 30 day prescription. Meant that I went several days without my hypertension medication till I could get a refill, not once, but numerous times. Interestingly enough, there were a couple occasions when I counted out those pills there were several missing. They'd begrudgingly acknowledge the shortage and give me the rest of the pills, but they were not even polite about it, and I'd get more verbal abuse from that pharmacist.
Are you telling me YOU wouldn't take measures to ensure you got all your medications under such circumstances? Or, as a pharmacist, you'd tell such a customer to take their business elsewhere instead acknowledging there might be a counting issue somewhere and addressing the problem to ensure customers got their entire prescriptions? To ensure that nobody had to go without their blood pressure meds???????
Not to mention the other "mistakes" they made. And being treated with such incredible rudeness by the pharmacist every time I encountered those problems. I took my business elsewhere, to Walgreens, and have never experienced anything but professionalism, courtesy, and even friendliness on the part of the personnel there. I no longer count out my pills at the counter-no need, I've never been shortchanged.
Funny, though, after that last fiasco at the CVS (when I was shortchanged by 30 pills in a 90 day prescription), and I had contacted their corporate office detailing my experiences there, that pharmacist attempted to call me at least twice. I refused to take his phone calls, though, I was DONE with that CVS. They also offered me a $10 gift certificate if only I'd switch my prescriptions back to CVS. Maybe when hell freezes over, but the experience at that CVS has kinda soured me on CVS. Though I do acknowledge there are probably CVS pharmacies that do provide stellar service, I'll stick with my local Walgreens.
But technically, that’s not multitasking. The concept of multitasking is actually doing two things at once. My husband could multitask. He could talk on the phone answering business questions while doing something else completely different on the computer. I once watched him do that — talked to a client about one thing, while composing an email to another client.
Simply going from one task to another, to another and then back to the first isn’t multitasking that’s just... tasking.
LOL, you're probably right. I'm pretty good at filling in down/waiting time with another task, but I always thought if that resulted in completing two ( or more) tasks at the same time it was multitasking. But doing two things at one time such as you describe, naahhh, I've never been good at that, and these days I'd not do a good job at either.
Except for reading on the john. I still think that's multitasking. So is walking and chewing gum, but I'm not sure how well I'd do that either.
If "counting" pills is what slowing the line down, my bank has machine money counters. Surely, a reliable machine can be made that will count pills for decades without ever making a mistake.. Or humans can be taught to count pills in less than six years with periodic refresher courses. And maybe, with experience, achieve the astounding speed of several hundred pills per hour.
The reality is that even the pill counting machines aren't that great, not as they are now, always running out and needing to be filled, or the drug that's supposed to be in there is out of stock so you have to go back to the computer and switch to a different mfg and then review, print, and fill again, this time manually. And seriously, you stand there and count 180 pills or 270 pills per prescription, you'll discover it takes more than a minute or two, especially when Mr Jones has eight or nine scripts for those kinds of amounts because he has diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, and oh yeah, his anti anxiety meds too. And one of those scripts has an insurance problem or need pre-authorization, or there aren't any refills left so the doctors office has to be contacted. I really wish it were as simple as you make it out to be, life would be a lot easier for everyone. Thank the gov't. and the corporations for adding layer upon layer of 'protection' and 'added value' in the process of getting your pills 'counted'.
I had to wait 5 days for my birth control pill at Walgreens a few months ago but it was still better than Walmart, who kept trying to sneak me a generic despite my doctor clearly writing 'do NOT substitute'.
Since it's a hormone, the fluctuations at Walmart caused a 50 lb weight gain. Not happy.
Personally, I'd rather have less techs & more degreed Pharmacists behind the counter. I want to deal with people I don't have to explain things to; such as how different manufacturers will produce meds with the same active ingredient but a different pH balance; which can cause peoples systems to react to it differently.
A Pharmacist gets this; the techs, not so much.
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