Workplace happiness

I don’t know about you, but one thing I want is a work environment that I enjoy going every day. For a retail setting, people are more willing to let it slide, because you get paid better to work there. Depending on the store, a CVS, Rite-Aid, or Walgreens can be stressful due to the sheer number of prescriptions filled per day. An expectation for all pharmacists, and healthcare professionals for that matter, is that they provide excellent patient care and customer service. I go to work and be nice to everyone I work with and serve, and in turn, they’re nice to me and help make my job enjoyable and easy.

Common sense, right?

Apparently not. Type in: www.angrypharmacist.com and it takes you to a website chockful of rants and stories about horrible work environments. Whether it involves a rude customer or a condescending supervisor, the theme is the same. Dissatisfied workers lead to lowered efficiency, not to mention increased turnover rate. I have heard of a few pharmacies in my area where the turnover rate is literally 2 or 3 months, because co-workers are rude to one another.

So how do we fix this? Obviously, everyone is going to keep leaving workplaces where they are not happy, especially when the pharmacy industry is in a shortage. What we need are quality managers who are willing to identify these negative environments and re-construct them into positive ones. We ought to integrate everyone in the pharmacy in the decision-making process, including technicians and clerks. Just because they don’t have a PharmD doesn’t make them any less human. A happy technician means a pharmacist can do their own job better.

Tax on Soda Pop

I’m sure that Coca-Cola and Pepsi are doing everything they can to stop this one. If you haven’t read the article I’m referencing, click here.

Not that I mind having a tax on sugary drinks, but the idea is more or less flawed. In a sense, while soda, in the strict sense, is wasted calories, one must take into account the diet and zero-calorie categories of soft drinks that have come into play in recent years. A blanket tax on all soft drinks to decrease caloric intake would technically involve our beloved Coke Zeros and Pepsi Ones, and the last time I checked, the Boston Tea Party was the result of unfair taxation. For this proposed tax to meet its purpose, it would have to target all drinks which exceed a minimum calorie threshold.

Another facet of this ‘battle against obesity’ is really sheer consumption of calories. While soft drinks, as the article points out, make up roughly 120 calories of an average person’s excess, it really can’t compare to the damage done by deep-fried french fries and fast-food mayo. Cutting out just one order of french fries from a fast-food joint will remove over 300 calories from a person’s daily intake. Discourage someone from eating fast food and the savings increase substantially. Or, if we really want to target empty calories, tax alcohol. Granted, that’ll stir up talk of the Prohibition days again, but any health professional will tell you that alcohol is bad news.

Anyway, a tax on soda pop probably won’t come for a while, but if you have an opinion about it, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll be happy to return to this topic..

A Pharmacist’s Degree

Something that has always bothered me a little bit about pharmacy is the fact that no one cares where you get your degree from. While partly because of the shortage of pharmacists, we cannot deny that the public must claim ignorance about the quality of pharmacists produced at the accredited schools of pharmacy. We care that the best lawyers come from top-ranked law schools like Yale and Harvard, and MBAs from Wharton are just as highly prized. There isn’t an undergraduate student or their parents who doesn’t recognize the quality behind an Ivy League education. Why is it, when it comes to healthcare, the one thing that directly influences your very health, do we not care about quality?

This is not to say that the school is a sign of one’s intelligence. There are many reasons why people may choose one school over another. However, when I meet a fourth-year, nearly graduating student from another pharmacy school who does not know that atenolol is used to treat hypertension, that presents a serious problem for consumers. Forget talking about the actual mechanism of the drug. Would you trust someone who doesn’t know one of the top 50 drugs and claims he is a medication expert? As with all healthcare professions, licensing is done through a written examination. With enough preparation, even a pharmacist who knows nothing coming out of school can study hard and cram information to pass the exam.

The excellence of a school, however, can not, and should not, be governed by the U.S. News and World Report rankings. My personal opinion is that people take too much stock in these rankings, and they ignore quality educations that are offered by smaller institutions. Instead, prospective pharmacists and consumers should be asking their pharmacists where they receive their education, and making appropriate decisions to find the best pharmacist to suit their needs. In a free market such as ours, if we keep asking about the quality of our pharmacists, we will inherently improve the quality and value of a pharmacy that hires the best pharmacists.

RX Musings Begins

Welcome to RX Musings!

I created this blog because there are so many facets of pharmacy life that the public doesn’t even know about. Unless one is a pharmacist or a pharmacy student, the general perception of pharmacy is a product-oriented, “lick and stick” profession. Ask around, and most people still think that pharmacy is a two-year degree, an adjunct to the healthcare services that we normally perceive as required for our health.

Let’s face it: Our healthcare model revolves around medication. Without it, going to see a physician does little to assuage our fear of illness and death. We expect to receive a prescription or some sort of product every time we go, because that, in many minds, is value. What we often forget is that medications themselves, are delicate tools. They have been carefully crafted to work precisely in our bodies; just like we rely on car mechanics to service our Chevys and Toyotas, we should rely on a medication expert to help ensure the product works the way it should.

That’s where pharmacy and pharmacists come in. The pharmacy profession now requires a four-year doctorate degree (PharmD). Students are trained to become medication experts, able to understand not only what you are taking, but how it affects you and how to optimize its safety and efficacy in your body. In future posts, I will often comment on healthcare issues, current news items of interest, and experiences that I have witnessed as I progress through the pharmacy profession. By reading, I hope that you will come to understand better your own health as well as the responsibilities of the pharmacy profession that exists to serve you.