A pharmacist responds to my blog post

My friend Donna passed along my blog post, “Pity the poor pharmacist,” to a retired pharmacist friend of hers. He was self-employed and never worked for a chain, but still found that his work could be stressful. Here’s his response (slightly edited):

“The pharmacy that I loved and trained for was not the same pharmacy I retired from 50 years later. I was very fortunate to have started as a delivery boy when I was 12 years old and continued working at the same pharmacy until I went away to UC at 19. During that time I learned a lot about pharmacy and pharmacists and had a fair idea what I could expect when I became one. The thing that I learned the most completely was that pharmacists are dealing with sick people. Most of them are nice and thankful for your help but some of them are real SOB’s and it is hard to tell if it is from their illness or if they were born that way. Either way, my job was to take care of them and this is where I got my satisfaction.

I have to admit that pharmacy has become harder and more stressful over time and less enjoyable. Most of these changes have come about not by pharmacists or other members of the health professions but by outsiders. The chain stores have their corporate chain of command responding to the shareholders who really don’t care about the individual pharmacist as long as he or she shows up for work and gets the job done.  

Most problems are caused by non-medical people controlling the money for third party payments. They were and probably still are a bunch of non-caring idiots placed in a position of power in a job they know nothing about. They caused me more grief in trying to get the medication to the patient but equally in my case being a store owner getting payment for prescriptions filled in a timely enough way that I wouldn’t go broke filling more prescriptions. I could write a whole book on the unfairness of their payment plans. They are the reason I would never go back into pharmacy. Not because I don’t like it; I love pharmacy, but the stress of not getting payments in a timely way so that I didn’t have to borrow money from the bank to pay the bills I had accrued filling prescriptions for their clients.  Now that is stressful!”

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