Compare pharmacy to other professions.  Yes you can always get a job
(somewhere that is) and pharmacy is well suited as a part-time job.
I worked both retail and hospital pharmacy.  I worked eighteen years in a
hospital.  As far as retail pharmacy goes the working conditions are bad.
First unless the store is real busy they will not hire you anyway.  Any
place that I worked in retail I was always constantly busy and I was darn
lucky to get caught up.  There was no scheduled lunch time or breaks.
Usually there was no time off from work.  If you missed a day due to
sickness, you had to make up the hours.

Then the pharmacy schools go about creating two classes of pharmacists.  The
regular working all hours and weekends pill counting guys and a clinical
pharmacist who only wants to do "professional work" like advising
physicians.

I read that today the average pharmacist spends one-third of his/her time
just doing paperwork and calling insurance companies.  In a profession like
medicine or law clerks are hired to do the paperwork.  When lunch time
arrives, the doctor or lawyer just takes off and goes out to eat.  That is
really a lot better than trying to count pills with one hand and handle
greasy chicken with the other!  There should not be a lot of job stress in
pharmacy but there is because of the lack of help and organization.  Its not
like we are actors in the TV show ER where we are busy doing CPR.  We are
basically taking the medicine out of stock bottles and putting them into
smaller labeled containers. The counseling part of our job isn't done very
well as we are too busy doing all the manual dispensing ourselves and don't
have time to spend with our patients.

net.man@verizon.net (T. Blando) wrote

  

Yeah, I guess you're right.

**snip**

Good Luck, Man.  I hope that your program treats you well and you graduate
on time.
Best Wishes!

Pharmacy is a calling.

A lot of people begin pharmacy school to make a lot of money once they are
out of school. However once they experience the retail world experience a
lot of them decide that this is not for them.

Pharmacy has certainly gone downhill in the past 25 years.  When I was doing
my internship there were hardly any 3rd party payers.  Patients submitted
their receipts to the insurance company and they were reimbursed.  It meant
some extra work on the pharmacists' parts because we had to help them
complete their forms (i.e. NDC numbers... name of manufacturer... price paid
etc).

We actually loved 3rd party cards because in the end there was a lot less
work for us.  We could set the paper claims aside and fill them in during
"downtimes" .  Usually all the medications were covered.  Reimbursement
rates were profitable. The problem was that there was no way of telling if
the patient really had coverage.  We got stuck on a lot of those.

When the"black box" version of pharmacy billing came into effected (late
80's early 90s) that risk was removed.  You filled the prescription... the
insurance information went into a "black box"  (usually a phone line) ...
the patients' coverage was verified and a copay popped out.  Wow... what a
improvement.  Our job suddenly got easier.

Then one day the insurance companies started to play doctor.  Formularies,
tier level copays, and prior authorizations took hold and suddenly we were
begging some little high school graduate employee for permission for a
patient to get a script filled multiple times daily.

Additionally competition heated up amongst the chains and the insurance
companies took advantage of this.  They reduced our reimbursement rates to
levels which cut profit margins and in fact sometimes caused a net loss per
prescription.  The chains faced the possibility of not getting patients in
the door if they did not accept the contracts.

Now chain stores know how much money a person walking around the store
spends per minute of walking around.  They  accepted the lower payments in
the hope that the patients would come into the store and buy impulse items.
Of course they still wanted to maximize profit. The chain stores handled
this by decreasing the fixed cost of filling prescriptions... mainly cutting
staff hours (especially technicians).

The net result pharmacists are much busier... with less help.  Stress levels
are intense.  We cannot do our jobs up to our own professional standards
because you cannot talk to doctors about changing medications to formulary
products and counsel patients at the same time.

I see this and I still feel the calling.  I'm still here.. however my
respect for my employers has certainly lessened and my feelings toward  3rd
party payers cannot be expressed in a public forum.  However a lot of people
considering pharmacy as a career see it and change their majors... or work
for a few years and then get out it all together.

And Pharmacy times wants to know why there is a shortage?

pharmacy on every block. Oh well, too bad for the chains.
<snip>

Its the only job security you have, the pharmacists shortage.

I wonder when some mail order outfit is going to start shipping Rxs overseas
to have them filled at lower cost and then sending them back to the States.
Could they import Pharmacists and get them licensed in the USA?  Hospitals
have been recruiting nurses from overseas for quite a while.  Too bad with
the pharmacists shortage that we don't start demanding a 40 hour work week,
better working conditions, closing for lunch,  and a quota of Rxs for a
pharmacist to fill in an eight hour shift.

No wonder you guys were named after robots!!!

Oi.

Aimee

I think coal miners are unionized. Do they get lunch breaks?