Behind the Scenes…at your local pharmacy

Who isn’t familiar with long waits to pick up a prescription at a local pharmacy? Taking a look at the pharmaceutical industry behind the scenes is a bit of an eye-opener. Let’s not even go into the debacle of payments doctors receive for prescribing drugs and drug misuse…let’s just admit that prescription usage has dramatically increased. How much? The most recent stats suggest that 48% of us filled at least one prescription for medication in the last month. That’s almost half of the US population and a whole lot of drugs. What does it take to get one lowly antibiotic into your hands?

Paring it down to the basics, seven steps go into filling a single prescription:

1.      The pharmacy has to receive the prescription. That sounds pretty basic, but a cursory check for validity is required. On top of that, how often have you checked on a prescription, only to hear it hasn’t been received from the doctor’s office? It’s maddening for everyone involved.

2.      Data must be entered. Even electronic prescriptions must be entered into the pharmacy’s computers. This is not a cut and paste operation. Again, issues arise as to quantity, dosage and how much a person may receive. Issues take time for verification and qualification.

3.      Each prescription must be billed into a payment plan. Since no one likes to let loose of its money easily, this can be a frustrating part of the process. You know, only on Tuesday and with a pint of unicorn blood. You no doubt think me facetious, but in reality, this becomes a time-consuming part of the process.

4.      A pharmacist check functions as the fail-safe to prevent a patient from receiving a harmful medication. The pharmacist’s expertise may be applied to any of several factors including patient assessment, insurance plan limitations and pharmacological knowledge. This valuable step limits the amount of time a pharmacist has to actually fill prescriptions.

5.      Your prescription enters the queue to be manually filled by either the pharmacist or a technician. If the stock runs low, it must be re-ordered and the prescription is partially filled, requiring more notations being entered into the computer.

6.      Pharmacists provide a second fail-safe check for each prescription to be sure the medication is actually the one ordered by your doctor and the dosage is correct. Labeling errors are caught and remedied.

7.      At long last, your prescription is placed into your hands.

Whew! No wonder it takes so long to get a prescription filled! As we age we end up with more and more pill bottles in our medicine cabinets, and the bloated process is easily overwhelmed. When you approach your local pharmacy include a healthy dose of patience, plan ahead and build up a healthy reservoir of courtesy in dealing with the frustration of getting your prescription filled. The third Tuesday in October was National Pharmacy Technician Day…perhaps a little after-the-fact kindness is in order.

Instead, harried techs are barraged with phone calls, answer a myriad of crazy questions and are continually interrupted in trying to meet your needs. The chaos gets put into perspective when his/her work is valued, when courtesy rather than glares meet them at the point of sale. I, too, am easily frustrated by long waits, but am resolved to become more patient as a patient. It helps me to realize the complexity of getting a few tablets put into a pill bottle.