“How do we ensure our patient drops and loses ~80% of his pills and that he slices the absolute fuck out of his fingers in the process?”
They’re locking my mental health goals behind a fidgety Saw trap built from scissors and miserliness.
I’ve had boxes where there were several single pills snipped from their blister packs rattling around in them. These pills in particular are tiny, like you can’t even feel them in your mouth when you take them, but they expect me to be able to finesse one out of a single blister with at least 3 extremely sharp and piercing corners on it 😒
If you’re a pharmacist and you do this, please go ahead and take the pills yourself, you clearly need 'em more than I do, ya sick fuck.
Order of 6 pills - give a 3x2, you now have a 2x2.
Order 9 pills - give the 2x2 and a 1x5, you now have a 1x5.
I see your problem, but I don’t see how that can turn into “a 10x1, a 4x1, a 2x1 and another 2x1” as your best choice. That looks like he got the left-over-pile after a day of ever order getting from a new pack.
Honestly, I don’t know why you even have to open a package. I’ve never seen that, and I’ve been in some long pharmacy queues. Never been to US though.
If I need exactly 10 pills, I get a box with 10 pills, packed in a factory like any other box of pills.
I’m saying that’s exactly what happened.
Things are done very, very differently here than most places. Blister packs are pretty uncommon, as are “per-patient” packages.
We rarely get bottles of 14, 30, 90 or whatever to give to the patient. It’s usually a giant “stock bottle” of like, 100, 500, 1000 pills that get counted out according to the prescription.
Your example of using the leftover from one script to the next works if you’re a single person in a small-ish pharmacy and it’s an uncommon drug, but when you’re one of 4 techs in a shitty retail pharmacy, you’re not going to ask every other person if they have a 2x2 strip of this med in their pile of go-backs, or spend time min-maxing the most efficient way to get the most pills in the least amount of strips. You’re gonna fill the thing as quickly as possible, because the medicine is what’s important, and you’re not gonna hold the backlog of prescriptions up because someone wants the nice complete pack of 10 and not the leftovers that are bound to pile up.
You are saying what I’m saying, and what everybody else is saying. But with a tone of defending it, as if it can’t be better.
Don’t give any customer your “trash pile”. Either take the time to do it right, or throw away the trashpile, or accept that customers feels like people are saying they feel.
Don’t make up excuses, the things you say you won’t do is not what is needed.
Maybe that’s the problem. Everybody else has figured it out. I know you can’t change that, but lots of people could if they wanted to.
Why doesn’t the customer just take the couple of minutes at the beginning of the month to dispense the blister packs into a daily pill box organizer?
Or just take a pair of scissors and round off the edges?
Just saying the problem is as easily or more easily solved by the customer as it is by the tech.
Certainly no medication should just be thrown out because the packaging is inconvenient. Making the techs take more time just means making the meds more expensive than they already are.
Obviously the real answer is to overhaul the whole system, but we live under an oligarchy here. Individual people have no power past barely the local level.
… You have to give someone the trash pile. Technicians are not going to throw away thousands of dollars of pills a month because the packaging is “MILDLY” frustrating. Your comment reads like a preachy teenager who has all the answers to every problem.
I don’t know why you’re trying to tell me how to do my job when a. you’ve very clearly never done anything remotely adjacent to it and b. Ive said that I don’t even do that job anymore.
In order to remedy this “MILDLY” frustrating problem that happens every so often, the entire distribution network of drugs in the US would need to be reworked from the ground up to start dispensing per-patient packages. Which, if you think that’s the most pressing problem the US medical industry needs to fix… One, I’ve got a bridge to sell you, and two, don’t make up excuses, do it right, get it changed, become a technician and start throwing away pills and refusing to fill people’s scripts with loose blister packs… Be the change you want to see and all that.
AKA pretty much every pharmacy these days, since these pharmacy companies are large enough to own the insurance companies.
What a fucking disgusting mess the US medical industry is.