what do pharmacist do anyway? Every time I go to the pharmacy, I see a lineup of people behind the counter doing something I’m sure they’re counting up pills, but did they do anything else?
In: 215
The top comment is a UK. Pharmacist. I’ll give the US answer. I’m assuming that you’re asking about a retail site like CVS or Walgreens.
When I worked retail pharmacy, my 2 big tasks were:
1. Making sure my techs didn’t make mistakes.
1a. This means ensuring that info from a prescription was correctly inputted into our system and sent to insurance. When paper prescriptions were more common, this was more essential than today with lots of computerized systems. Most humans can make a mistake and the pharmacist is the person responsible for double checking things.
1b. Most stores I worked at, I’d catch a couple tech errors per hour. Let’s say 2-5% of orders.
2. Making sure a catastrophic event will not occur with the order. We were the last line of a medical double check before a patient takes a medicine so if we didn’t catch it, the catastrophe would occur.
2a. I think that this is what most of the public thinks that a pharmacist does. I’d look for things like med interactions, duplication of meds, inappropriate therapies based on age or weight. Retail pharmacists usually don’t have enough info to optimize therapy for a patient, but we could catch those really bad events.
2b. It was really rare to catch one of these. I’d say every once a week or two. Let’s say 1 per 10,000 orders.
3. Troubleshooting odd orders. This can be getting insurance to cover a weird dosage. It could be calling a doc to let them know about drug shortages and discussing alternatives.
3a. These took up significant amount of our time with little direct benefit. You can imagine that it’s hard to get a doc on the phone to make a drug change. I’ve definitely known some colleagues who will just tell a patient that they don’t have a med and shop elsewhere rather than try and solve the issue.
So to summarize, when you are asking for what pharmacists do, we are mostly looking for a needle in a haystack of orders and addressing changes if anything needs to be addressed.
However, it sounds like you are really asking: why does it take so long to get a prescription? Mainly business requirements and throughput rate. Techs handle the majority of orders. They input data into their computer system and send a claim to insurance. Then count the pills and ring up the order at the register. The pharmacist confirms it all looks correct. This all takes time. In a perfect world, each step could be 10-60 seconds, and maybe 5 minutes total. In the real world, the techs and pharmacist are not sitting and waiting to do your specific task right away. There’s other tasks that need to be completed first. There’s a constant stream of orders. There’s calls that interrupt things and alerts that need addressing.
When you ask why there’s a lineup of people, the answer is because there’s a lineup of people. It takes time to do any task, and the more business that comes your way, the longer it will take to work on any individual within the line.
Latest Answers