Meet Lan T.
My name is Lan Tran. I came to the US from Vietnam in the 1980s, went to high school in Los Angeles then college and eventually pharmacy school. I started as a pharmacist in 1989, 19 years ago.I like helping people, that's why I came into this career. But there are many problems that make things harder.
There's too much paper work, reports, emails. I don't think it is necessary. It's not related to the patients. Even though we delegate this to the techs, it still takes us a lot of time. It puts more stress on us. You come in, and you have a whole stack, a list of things you have to do, you have to let the tech do, it takes away from working with the customers.
I think we waste so much time regarding drug change,
with the formularies. The drug company, the insurance company, they
focus the kind of drugs - they don't give the doctors the flexibility
to do whatever he wants to do. So that creates a lot of problem for us
because most, majority of the time, I have to call the doctor to change
the medication because the drug is not covered. We are right in the
middle, we are the middlemen. We have to call the doctor to change the
drug, the doctors don't want it. Then we have to call the insurance,
the insurance says, "Oh, this one." You have to call the doctor, have
the doctor call the insurance to change it. In the meantime, you have
to explain to the customer why the drug is not the one the doctor
prescribed at the beginning.
That wastes a lot of time for us. But what can we do? Because they want to provide the cheap but effective drugs but individually it is different, so it should be up to the doctor to decide. Sometimes we make the doctor mad because the doctor says, "Nay, I don't want this drug." But the insurance won't pay for drug. Then he has to call the doctor, insurance will argue with them to get the drug for the patient and some of the doctors they don't have time to do those things. And then it is the patient who doesn't get anything.
That wastes a lot of time for us. But what can we do? Because they want to provide the cheap but effective drugs but individually it is different, so it should be up to the doctor to decide. Sometimes we make the doctor mad because the doctor says, "Nay, I don't want this drug." But the insurance won't pay for drug. Then he has to call the doctor, insurance will argue with them to get the drug for the patient and some of the doctors they don't have time to do those things. And then it is the patient who doesn't get anything.
My name is Ray Funatsu and I've been a pharmacist since 1963. In '74 I started working as a manager with Sav-on until '94; that's when I stepped down because it got to be a little too much. I worked until 2000 and retired and now I'm on-call.
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