Meet Celywn F.
Los Angeles, CAMy name is Celywn Francis. I've been with my company for over 20 years. The pharmacy industry isn't everything I expected it to be when I started. You don't have as much time as you would like. It is always rush, rush rush. You don't have enough time to obtain important information from the patients, to get as much information as possible to make a decision.
Working in the large retail chains is very stressful. Especially if the volume of the store is large. You have to do so many prescriptions with a limited amount of help. When you don't have enough support staff, the pharmacist has to do the job of cashier, clerks, everybody. This keeps the pharmacist extremely stressed out. I have all this extra work to do plus filling the scripts and this can put my license at risk. You get so tired you may see one thing but it may be something else. Technicians may type in directions incorrectly.
If you fill a patient's prescription wrong one time they lose
confidence in you, and understandably so. If you fill my prescription wrong
then I won't have any confidence in you either!
There is an incentive to these chains to understaff them: profit. But it is increasing errors everywhere in the industry. And not because pharmacists are less careful. We are very careful. But we are overworked, stressed, fatigued. To address this we need adequate staffing. We need breaktime for pharmacists. In California we are entitled to a 10-15 minute break by law. But then when you come back your workload has increased because of the work that accumulated during that break. So we can't do one without the other.
We need breaktime AND adequate staffing, especially at critical times, rush hours. When we talk to management about staffing they don't respond because the bottom line is if they hire more people then they are not getting enough money. We need legislation, regulations, one pharmacist-one technician-one clerk- x amount of prescriptions. That's the only way management will do anything. If we as pharmacists don't do anything, if we let things go the way they are, then things will just get worse. I am just one person.
There is an incentive to these chains to understaff them: profit. But it is increasing errors everywhere in the industry. And not because pharmacists are less careful. We are very careful. But we are overworked, stressed, fatigued. To address this we need adequate staffing. We need breaktime for pharmacists. In California we are entitled to a 10-15 minute break by law. But then when you come back your workload has increased because of the work that accumulated during that break. So we can't do one without the other.
We need breaktime AND adequate staffing, especially at critical times, rush hours. When we talk to management about staffing they don't respond because the bottom line is if they hire more people then they are not getting enough money. We need legislation, regulations, one pharmacist-one technician-one clerk- x amount of prescriptions. That's the only way management will do anything. If we as pharmacists don't do anything, if we let things go the way they are, then things will just get worse. I am just one person.
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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