Yes, and no. Hospitals can have their downtime, but they also have their stress times (just like retail, to a lesser extent.) Except, unlike retail, where if things stress out to the max, at worse people will throw temper tantrums about their weight time, in hospitals when things stress out....people can die. Admittedly, this level of stress happens less in hospitals, then in retail from what I've seen, but when it happens in hospital.....falling behind doesn't mean that your manager will lecture about long wait times, it literally means people could die.
And, as always, this stress falls on the pharmacist to a FAR greater extant then it falls on a technician. So just because your technician isn't stressed.....that doesn't meant that the work environment isn't stressful for the pharmacist. (I don't know your technician, but maybe she is the kind of technician that gets in the way and doesn't do anything, so it helps everyone if she just stays out of the way?)
This. I am betting no higher up's know about this, or the supervisor would be in huge trouble. Insurance liability would never make this situation allowable, and if the supervisor were even minimally competent, he should know this.
We have "comp time" at my hospital....in a situation like this, the technician would clock out when s/he leaves the hospital, then clock back in when s/he comes in. The manager can then edit the clocked out time as "comp time", which means s/he wasn't working because of lack of need and s/he isn't paid for working that time, but the clocked out time counts as "hours worked" when figuring eligibility for benefits/insurance. I'd like to think that Momus's technician was actually running errands on comp time, and due to a misunderstanding Momus thought they were on the clock.....but I've had the misfortune in my career of working with managers who really were that ignorant of anything that didn't directly involve drugs/pharmacy.