The Drive thru at the Pharmacy, Good or Bad?
Retail pharmacies operate by serving the patient directly by dispensing out medications for them to take home. Many of these pharmacies now offer drive thru services in addition to the normal service they offer. This new service offers a lot of advantages and opportunities for the field of pharmacy and for patients. While the advantages with having a drive thru at the pharmacy are plentiful, there are also a number of disadvantages that come with it as well.
I have been working as a pharmacy intern with big chain pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens for a couple of years now. Some locations have drive thru services while others don’t. I also have a few independent pharmacies located near my neighborhood that I go to for picking up my parents’ and grandparents’ medications.
There are a lot of similarities between all of these pharmacies as a customer, but the one that had drive thru services always seemed busier. At the big chain pharmacies that I’ve worked for, most of them had a drive thru service. Patients regularly used the service daily and sometimes, the drive thru window was even more used than the counter. Patients would hit the button outside the drive thru window, and it would ring the phones telling someone inside the pharmacy that there was a patient at the drive thru. Pharmacy team members would verify the correct information with the patient, and then the medications would be paid for and then given to the patient.
I believe that having drive thru services at big chain pharmacies increases the efficiency of dispensing. The interaction is quicker, and the pharmacy team does more of the work at the drive thru window. The faster patients can pick up their medication, the less time team members will have to spend at the cashier, which they can use to do other things.
Without the drive thru service, the line for the counter would be longer, which keeps team members away from the other things that they could be doing. The interaction would also take longer as patient factors could such as additional items, and the speed of which they use the pin pad or take their card out of their wallets could also extend the time. The other problem would be for the patients that can’t come into the store due to complications such as the sick, elderly, disabled, and people with babies in the car. Without the drive thru, these patients will have a much tougher time getting the medication they need.
Although there are plenty of good reasons why drive thru services at the pharmacy is a good thing, there are also some downsides. The drive thru service can be more prone to mistakes and errors because things can be misheard over the phone. Since there is more work for the team member to do at the drive thru, the patients won’t be able to completely verify every piece of information like they would at the counter, which means the opportunity for error is higher. An example of this would be at Walgreens, where a patient has to verify their address and then verify the last 4 digits of their phone number before the medication can be dispensed. However at the drive thru, only the address is verified by the team member, without the need to verify the phone number.
Some pharmacists who work at retail pharmacies where there are drive thru services say they feel as though they are fast food workers rather than pharmacists. They feel as though their image of a pharmacist is affected negatively because of this, and would prefer patients come to the counter to talk to them directly rather than through a window over the phone. Similar to this, independent pharmacies like the ones near my neighborhood also share the same sentiment and feel drive thru services at the pharmacy should be limited to only those who need it, not to everyone.
The pharmacists who work at the big chains tended to be in support of drive thru services while the pharmacists who work in the independent pharmacies tended to not be in support of them. From my own experience, I believe that drive thru services are important to the field of pharmacy. It may not be perfect, but it can be improved upon to be made better. Although some say the services bring a negative images upon pharmacists, I personally believe that helping people get easier and faster access to their medication outweighs that.