You Better Run (or, signs that a pharmacy is bad)
That old folksy wisdom about only being as strong as your weakest link is true. You are only as strong as the weakest person on the team. Sooner or later the weakest person attempts to work independently and makes a mess of things. As a pharmacist, the number one thing that determines whether a pharmacy is good or bad is the quality of the worst employee, usually the technician.
The first pharmacy I staffed at was terrible. I covered three months of maternity leave in a nice upper middle class suburb and it was great at first. A busy place but the technicians were good. Sadly all three senior technicians left within the first month, including two of the best technicians I’ve ever met. The pharmacy quickly turned into a garbage dump. When the big chain pharmacies pay less than McDonalds, the competent employees leave. The backwash was a collection of the infirm, stupid, and obese who were incapable of running a pharmacy. We had a delightful manager on the floor do her best to unfuck us, but she didn’t have the power to do it.
Things were bad, we all started staying late. The technicians at least get paid for staying late, but the pharmacists are salaried so we’re just donating time. During the runup to Christmas Eve I worked 15 days in a row, staying maybe two hours late each day and showing up early some days. The other pharmacists did too, and we were still way behind. The job wasn’t possible with the quantity and quality of technician. My Christmas present was not having to ever return. I heard through the grapevine years later that they never recovered.
How do you beat the situation? You just leave. You just tolerate it for a while and disconnect yourself from the outcome of your work. Customers will complain a lot about how messed up everything is, but don’t worry about the things you can’t change. Luckily being a float means that all my assignments are temporary so the brevity of the experience lifts the seriousness of it. It’s like The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The second worst pharmacy I staffed was also bad, but more subtly. The pharmacy manager had long since stopped caring about the quality of her work, so she made like Frozen and let it go. On occasion she would say something that was a major red flag, like she would mention how she didn’t bother reconciling the discrepancies in the CII counts, or she apparently didn’t know how to automate a request for prior authorization. She never did any of the manager stuff, even stuff she was expected to do. Management didn’t care because the numbers were good. What I like about this extremely loose style is that nobody will care about your minor negligence if the manager is excessively negligent.
The problem of inattention is that if the manager doesn’t care, then the technicians can be deficient in quality because they’ll hire just anyone. And so it was. We had people who were clearly unfit to be technicians, like they couldn’t use the computer and were bad at counting tablets. That laid back style doesn’t work when you need to get shit done and unfuck something. We wouldn’t finish and we’d just leave. I stopped staying late or showing up early because corporate clearly didn’t care, so I didn’t either. Management sets the tone of these things. At the end of the day management is responsible because they own the dump. Once again floating saved me from a shitty situation.