Drug Topics Article: Farewell to the druggist culture

[BidingMyTime]

The article starts here:

http://drugtopics.modernmedicine.com/drug-topics/news/abandoning-druggist-culture?page=0,1

My question concerns a passage on this page:

http://drugtopics.modernmedicine.com/drug-topics/news/abandoning-druggist-culture?page=0,3

It was around 1995 when pharmacists quit being druggists and started bowing to the commands of sophisticated prescription-filling computer programs.
These programs are stool pigeons. When you walk away from the prescription mill and its insatiable need for speed, even for just five minutes, they’ve got you. They’re looking for you. A micro-notation is recorded under your name in the cloud. Too many of those, and they can replace you with a new graduate robo-dispenser.
A pharmacist with druggist muscles would not hesitate to help a mom choose what to do for her three-year-old son’s complaint.
Then a tattle-tale report is generated on the screen of another nonpharmacist Master of the Universe MBA. Too many like this and an everlasting not-a-team-player notation goes into your permanent record.
The computer is stupid. You were practicing patient-centered pharmacy, something all of us should aspire to, and the computer is going to punish you with a simplistic report stating that you were dead in the water for seven minutes and 18 seconds.

This is the first I've heard about this. Is this for real? Anyone have any idea what chains/programs are doing this? How is this even rational, given in most of the retail pharmacies I've worked in (not to mention pharmacies with little to no technician help), pharmacists have been expected to fill & ring, in additional to pharmacist duties. And obviously there are pharmacist duties, mandatory counseling, compounding, ordering, record keeping/inventory that can't be recorded by a computer. I can understand "metrics" that measure wait times and such (I don't know that they are always rational in the end goals, but I can understand them), but I don't understand how a report showing how much a pharmacist was on a computer computes to how they were doing their job (thinking of a pharmacist I knew who had an extremely high check rate, as he never actually checked anything, just OK'd it in the computer, needless to say he had an extremely high error rate as well.) Maybe I'm naïve, and I don't doubt that computers record this, I just have a hard time believing that pharmacists are routinely being "replaced" because of this.

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[awval999]

Have you not read Plagakis' articles before? They have the same theme. He really hates the chains. He's an old school druggist.

 

[TheGoatBoyy]

He always strikes me as a douche. I get that he is lobbying for a destruction of metrics and for some basic pharmacist rights that everyone is/should be on board with, but he always comes across as fake to me. Especially since his stories are always so unbelievable. two-thirds of the time its him being extremely rude to a patient or to his bosses/co=workers.

"Old school" pharmacists or as he puts them, "druggists" are known more for fraud and selling snake oil than helping people with proper counseling and OTC choices. The man who complains that not enough is taught about compounding (another area that is shown to be high in fraud, overcharging patients, and not exacting a thing that needs to be class room taught) is so horribly and unashemedly out of date on any current usage of medicine that it is frightening.

He complains in previous articles that his hospital pharmacist knows nothing because they said Plavix with Prilosec's interaction is overblown, which it is, a simple 5 minute literature search would show this. Yet, in the same article he admits to knowing nothing about strokes, stroke treatment, tPA or anything else. Guy read a computer DUR prompt once about PPI/clopidogrel interactions and thinks he is superman.

 

[Sparda29]

Jim P is pretty awesome.

 

[BidingMyTime]

He complains in previous articles that his hospital pharmacist knows nothing because they said Plavix with Prilosec's interaction is overblown, which it is, a simple 5 minute literature search would show this. Yet, in the same article he admits to knowing nothing about strokes, stroke treatment, tPA or anything else. Guy read a computer DUR prompt once about PPI/clopidogrel interactions and thinks he is superman.

You are right about that. I remember his one article where he was quite happy that he had "corrected" a doctor who thought that Bactrim DS should be used for a skin infection. I cringe anytime he mentions medication usage in his articles, he makes pharmacists look dumb. And its not like he's speaking off the top of his head (when any of us could forget stuff), he is doing an article for a print magazine, so there is no reason why he shouldn't be (as you put it, at least a 5 minute literature search!) before he submits his articles (and I'm surprised the editors don't check out anything he is saying....I suspect they haven't practiced pharmacy for quite awhile either.)

But I was curious in regards to my opening post, if he was totally making up about pharmacists being fired for not doing anything on the computer for 7 minutes, or if there really was something like this going or, or perhaps being misinterpreted by him.

 

[owlegrad]

Everytime I step away from the computer for more than 5 minutes my shock collar gives me a buzz.

In all seriousness I have never heard of anything like this I think he is just being his usual sensational self. I like his stuff but he does go a little overboard and sometimes doesn't really seem to understand what you talking about when he talks about drugs.