Walmart accountability

[UpperEnergy]

Walmart is supposed to be very strict about following all Federal, State laws and their own SOP and compliance. In some States like California there are limitations regarding of filling prescriptions with one pharmacist. If more than one technician fills at the same time, it is not deemed to be appropriate. However, I have seen a plenty of pharmacists had done it in the course of their work. If this kind of situation becomes the case, what would be the consequences? I knew one manager who was acting as a dictator and told his crew to follow his orders or he would find the way to fire them for any reason. What are the results of those violations? How serious are they if the extend of the involvement includes multiple pharmacists?

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[owlegrad]

Wait, only one tech can fill per pharmacist in California? How is that remotely possible?

 

[BenJammin]

I look forward to the day when state boards of pharmacy are abolished. There are too many rules and regulations. When I was doing my outpatient shifts at the hospital I almost lost my mind when a board inspector told us that we were doing transfers wrong. We not only have to record the refills remaining but the original number of refills authorized. How in the hell is that relevant for non controlled substances? Why does it matter that the warfarin I'm transferring originally had 12 refills but now it has 10? It's almost as if the state has to find a reason to keep these people employed. They're like chain pharmacy managers telling their staff to not do more with less because it will result in budget cuts the next year. "We gotta make up rules so old man tommy gun can stay employed with us and get his $60,000 a year paid for by the tax paying American".

 

[Sine Cura]

California filler to RPH ratio is (2n-1):n where n is the number of pharmacists, so there can be only 1 filler if there is only 1 pharmacist on duty, 3 if there are 2. Interns are not part of that filling limit.

People in the U.S. health care non-system other than pharmacists do not realize how over-regulated pharmacy is compared to their silo

 

[UpperEnergy]

California filler to RPH ratio is (2n-1):n where n is the number of pharmacists, so there can be only 1 filler if there is only 1 pharmacist on duty, 3 if there are 2. Interns are not part of that filling limit.

People in the U.S. health care non-system other than pharmacists do not realize how over-regulated pharmacy is compared to their silo

I like your active participation and always sound advice. If more than 1 technician fills, what would be the worst situation for the upper management in terms of the decision? Would it also look bad if more than just one person was involved but the management chooses only one to be singled out? What is the company policy? What if it effected a lot of stores on the separate occasions?

 

[Sine Cura]

Walmart policy is that pharmacists must follow all pharmacy regulations. If a pharmacy manager is knowingly and deliberately disregarding the fill ratio and threatening staff that don't follow along, that would be an easy termination if open doored or you call ethics line (can verify on camera) provided the staff corroborate this with their testimony.

 

[owlegrad]

Huh. I guess my next question would have to be what constitutes "filling"? Can one person pull drugs for another to count or would both of those techs be considered as "filling"? Maybe someone can put drugs back for the "fill" tech?

I really cannot wrap my head around this at all, lol. How many can one person fill in an hour? Obviously it depends on unit of use vs having to count #360 pills but I would think 20-30 is probably average-ish? I don't see how a >200/day pharmacy could possibly follow that ratio unless they get more RP hours/overlap. If that is the case good job California!

 

[Sine Cura]

At Walmart you don't pull anything for the filler and the filler puts away his own stock product.

A proficient tech could fill 40/hr and very proficient techs can do 50-60/hr uninterrupted. 30 or below is too slow. Interruptions like pickup or phone bring that down of course.

At a low to mid volume walmart (<1900 sold/week) typically there will be max one person filling for the entire business day. Stores with higher volume like >2500/week would probably need the 2nd tech to keep up the fill queue down typically but they may have 3 pharmacists

 

[SoylentGreen]

Wait, only one tech can fill per pharmacist in California? How is that remotely possible?

I have never worked in California but I did work with a pharmacist who transferred in from California. She did a lot of things that would normally be the technician's job such as filling that we wouldn't have done. She had they had very litttle tech help out there.

 

[Sine Cura]

Walmart pharmacists in California are very spoiled compared to WM other states.

 

[UpperEnergy]

At Walmart you don't pull anything for the filler and the filler puts away his own stock product.

A proficient tech could fill 40/hr and very proficient techs can do 50-60/hr uninterrupted. 30 or below is too slow. Interruptions like pickup or phone bring that down of course.

At a low to mid volume walmart (<1900 sold/week) typically there will be max one person filling for the entire business day. Stores with higher volume like >2500/week would probably need the 2nd tech to keep up the fill queue down typically but they may have 3 pharmacists

I completely agree with everything you have mentioned above. My store has been doing >2500 a week with one pharmacist working on weekends. There are way too many things to consider where the manager should be a part of the solution but the reality is the customers want their medications on time regarding of circumstances you have to be dealing with. Leaving a pharmacist with 400-500 scripts as a piling up mountain for a few days, giving a bunch of technicians, dumping tons of resolutions and saying Good luck would be the right thing to do? It's up to a pharmacy manager to regulate the workflow to prevent stuff like that. However, our pharmacy manager's ignorance and creation of that model seemed to be normal. How could you possibly prevent this kind of set up and be in compliance?

 

[Sine Cura]

How many are you actually doing on weekends? At a particular ghetto store I used to work at, it was not uncommon to fill 230+ on Saturday and and hit maybe 180 on Sunday with your parade of ED scripts, dental scripts, discharge scripts etc. Obviously the pharmacist has to fill a little bit to stay caught up. This assuming you have techs who understand the basics and not total noobs you have to train up.

If you are in California and actually sell 2500/week or more you probably have 3 pharmacists multiple days a week so there could be two fillers regularly 1030 AM-730 PM or 1000 AM-700 PM to avoid pile-ups.

Leaving yesterday's fill for the next day is never acceptable (this is where I have problems with clown-show pharmacists who allow the techs to FF stuff instead of just clearing it). There is no time for that at chains especially Walmart with a million little ticky-tack initiatives and requirements

 

[sozetone]

Walmart is supposed to be very strict about following all Federal, State laws and their own SOP and compliance. In some States like California there are limitations regarding of filling prescriptions with one pharmacist. If more than one technician fills at the same time, it is not deemed to be appropriate. However, I have seen a plenty of pharmacists had done it in the course of their work. If this kind of situation becomes the case, what would be the consequences? I knew one manager who was acting as a dictator and told his crew to follow his orders or he would find the way to fire them for any reason. What are the results of those violations? How serious are they if the extend of the involvement includes multiple pharmacists?

I manage a WM in colorado. I cant comment on california or tech ratio to fill. I can say however that they have focused heavily on creating a newer accountability matrix . They have cut everything to the bone by me. We have only enough pharmacists to cover the stores, they are always beging for us to cover shifts when other pharms have accidents, illness, PTO, whatever, ya know? Same for the techs. I dunno if its my DM or it's everywhere though? Is anyone experiencing this same issue? My staff hours have been cut twice, S3G tech hours slashed about 30-40%!! , It's getting hard to even function. And it's a real shame because i took 2 years of my life to fix up this ghetto dumpster fire store , and now it's 2nd in profit in my market, making good metrics like adherence, Digital engagement, inventory is great, ......but still you cant escape the stigma of being the "red headed stepchild" so to speak. You ar ALWAYS a ghetto store. I have a homeless shelter on one side and a psych hospital on the other. The neighborhood is in poverty as well, so you can imagine what this place is like. Nobody thought I would bring this store this far. I'm proud, but it;s time to leave man,... im burnt out.

 

[UpperEnergy]

I manage a WM in colorado. I cant comment on california or tech ratio to fill. I can say however that they have focused heavily on creating a newer accountability matrix . They have cut everything to the bone by me. We have only enough pharmacists to cover the stores, they are always beging for us to cover shifts when other pharms have accidents, illness, PTO, whatever, ya know? Same for the techs. I dunno if its my DM or it's everywhere though? Is anyone experiencing this same issue? My staff hours have been cut twice, S3G tech hours slashed about 30-40%!! , It's getting hard to even function. And it's a real shame because i took 2 years of my life to fix up this ghetto dumpster fire store , and now it's 2nd in profit in my market, making good metrics like adherence, Digital engagement, inventory is great, ......but still you cant escape the stigma of being the "red headed stepchild" so to speak. You ar ALWAYS a ghetto store. I have a homeless shelter on one side and a psych hospital on the other. The neighborhood is in poverty as well, so you can imagine what this place is like. Nobody thought I would bring this store this far. I'm proud, but it;s time to leave man,... im burnt out.

I manage a WM in colorado. I cant comment on california or tech ratio to fill. I can say however that they have focused heavily on creating a newer accountability matrix . They have cut everything to the bone by me. We have only enough pharmacists to cover the stores, they are always beging for us to cover shifts when other pharms have accidents, illness, PTO, whatever, ya know? Same for the techs. I dunno if its my DM or it's everywhere though? Is anyone experiencing this same issue? My staff hours have been cut twice, S3G tech hours slashed about 30-40%!! , It's getting hard to even function. And it's a real shame because i took 2 years of my life to fix up this ghetto dumpster fire store , and now it's 2nd in profit in my market, making good metrics like adherence, Digital engagement, inventory is great, ......but still you cant escape the stigma of being the "red headed stepchild" so to speak. You ar ALWAYS a ghetto store. I have a homeless shelter on one side and a psych hospital on the other. The neighborhood is in poverty as well, so you can imagine what this place is like. Nobody thought I would bring this store this far. I'm proud, but it;s time to leave man,... im burnt out.

I have read a lot of your messages and they are always great especially since you depict reality as it is. We used to have a good pharmacy manager and our district manager could not be happier with our metrics, flow, the number of scripts... but they gradually decided to squeeze more and more when it became just impossible to function. She didn't have a choice and left because there were cutting more and more hours for techs and clerks but expecting more as well. After she left, our district manager didn't consider her to be great anymore and found the replacement with the worst manager I had ever seen working there for a descent period. Most of the stores in the district were forced to be working with a limited help and hours but her new pharmacy manager got no restrictions at anything: resources, people, hours while managing to do significantly less work and even asking for additional help from the other short-handed stores. I have never seen anyone getting as much help as double compared to an average store having between 2-3 pharmacists. (The pharmacy manager asked for 4-5 pharmacists and got approved while it was not even busy). I don't know what should you think about business model tailored to a specific pharmacy because somebody happened to be so special or precious whatever you name it?

 

[UpperEnergy]

How many are you actually doing on weekends? At a particular ghetto store I used to work at, it was not uncommon to fill 230+ on Saturday and and hit maybe 180 on Sunday with your parade of ED scripts, dental scripts, discharge scripts etc. Obviously the pharmacist has to fill a little bit to stay caught up. This assuming you have techs who understand the basics and not total noobs you have to train up.

If you are in California and actually sell 2500/week or more you probably have 3 pharmacists multiple days a week so there could be two fillers regularly 1030 AM-730 PM or 1000 AM-700 PM to avoid pile-ups.

Leaving yesterday's fill for the next day is never acceptable (this is where I have problems with clown-show pharmacists who allow the techs to FF stuff instead of just clearing it). There is no time for that at chains especially Walmart with a million little ticky-tack initiatives and requirements

We used to do more than 2500, maybe even closer to 3000 a week with three pharmacists on average. As we got our new pharmacy manager we started losing a lot of good workers and business because of her attitude, approach, work ethics, management skills and care. She had double standards and her rules/requirements frequently didn't match what was supposed to be in reality even though she was stirred towards Walmart SOP... Her demands changed very frequently every time she talked to other pharmacists and what was the right thing for yesterday would not be the same today or tomorrow. She would let other people do the work including hers, criticizing everything without any valid reasons; however, she was perfect. I hope Walmart doesn't have to be so desperate to hire people similar to those to work as pharmacy managers not taking in consideration people or their business goals. I always thought that losing a big portion of their profit suddenly would make them wonder why? You don't want to let a perfectly good store to go down because it would be so much harder to bring it back to normal again. If we are caught up on weekends, we still would do over 230-250... Having over 300-500 scripts would not be fair for one pharmacist but our manager doesn't think she should help or care because she is somebody who was never urgent enough to prioritize or finish her portion. She has lost some really good and valuable techs or other workers but she had never cared because everyone is replaceable.

 

[sozetone]

I have read a lot of your messages and they are always great especially since you depict reality as it is. We used to have a good pharmacy manager and our district manager could not be happier with our metrics, flow, the number of scripts... but they gradually decided to squeeze more and more when it became just impossible to function. She didn't have a choice and left because there were cutting more and more hours for techs and clerks but expecting more as well. After she left, our district manager didn't consider her to be great anymore and found the replacement with the worst manager I had ever seen working there for a descent period. Most of the stores in the district were forced to be working with a limited help and hours but her new pharmacy manager got no restrictions at anything: resources, people, hours while managing to do significantly less work and even asking for additional help from the other short-handed stores. I have never seen anyone getting as much help as double compared to an average store having between 2-3 pharmacists. (The pharmacy manager asked for 4-5 pharmacists and got approved while it was not even busy). I don't know what should you think about business model tailored to a specific pharmacy because somebody happened to be so special or precious whatever you name it?

I have seen that many times. It wont last though. The DM is just providing maximal support for a while to keep the store afloat. All they care about is money and they are being instructed to cut costs right now more than ever. So they cannot continue to do that for more than 3-6 months to ensure a smooth transition of PIC's ya know? if it continues for longer and preferential treatment is shown, the DM could be fired. This is all usually approved through the regional as well, so everyone is on board. That said, ethical and moral values are declining these days, so anything is possible. I wouldnt take it too seriously though. Most of us will not have our jobs in 3-5 years. including your pals....So an exit strategy is what we should be focusing on heavily.

 

[Sine Cura]

You would think a DM babying a clown-show new PIC would contribute to that DM getting run off during the next market realignment.

 

[sozetone]

You would think a DM babying a clown-show new PIC would contribute to that DM getting run off during the next market realignment.

Your right, thats what they do, they say "hey you are needed in Alaska, thats all we have right now, but you can re-apply for other positions and be considered!" thats the wal mart way.

 

[UpperEnergy]

We went through some changed with a few district managers being replaced, regional managers were passing through as well, regional store managers. The last district manager we have had is still there while they were some speculations but everything seemed to be stable for that manager for now even though that manager's efforts and results are not the greatest for the pharmacists contacting that manager on a regular basis. The higher management must have been satisfied if no drastic measures were taken. I don't think the high upper management is blind but they don't notice a particular store as being favored and extremely accommodated because of one person at the expense of other workers. It has being well over a year.