What factors make CVS the worst retail pharmacy to work for as a pharmacist?

[Judgment Dragon]

What factors make CVS the worst retail pharmacy to work for as a pharmacist?

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[sosoo]

have u read this thread below your topic? "Promoted to CVS PIC and I'm clueless."
now imagine someone in charge of the pharmacy having no clue what they're doing (no proper training whatsoever)... how do u think the pharmacy will turn out? techs not having adequate training is a problem, and they require the pharmacist to know what they're doing... on top of that, district management will not give you enough staffing....

 

[Leper Messiah]

Understaffed, too many metrics, many stores have a double dive thru with only one tech (maybe) to run two lanes, and they seem to want to on the phone 100% of the time while multitasking. If you're not helping answer the phone, you're making calls to insurance, prescribers, and patient compliance and follow up calls. 13 hour days without a break... I could go on

 

[Leper Messiah]

Although it seems like more than half of the overnight pharmacists like their job

 

[ancienbon]

It is the metrics and lack of tech help that makes it the worse.

 

[pillpharmer14]

We could make the longest thread in SDN history about it, but it would probably be easier to just search the forum for "CVS". Read about 10 of those threads and you'll start to understand.

Que the CVS nazi's calling me lazy and incompetent in 3...2...1...

 

[WVUPharm2007]

Although it seems like more than half of the overnight pharmacists like their job

Yup. The de facto guaranteed lunch break I get every night (computers reboot for 20 minutes or so.) The 7 days in a row I get off every other week. The salary that is in the top 5% of pharmacists ($140k, no overtime). The low stress environment. The ability to stop what I'm doing and counsel patients. Nice stock purchasing program.

I really don't mind going to work. Sure, if I won the Powerball, I'd quit. But outside of that scenario, I think this job is fantastic. I recommend the job to everyone. I'm shocked its not the most competitive position in the company to be honest.

 

[Sine Cura]

For me, what really differentiates CVS from other companies is the lack of manpower and pharmacist workload compared to other companies, doing the most with the least.

When all your staff has a basic level of competency and really understand how everything works, CVS is easy (not that I ever had this). This is difficult to achieve in chain pharmacy in general because ambitious and smart pharmacists don't really go into chain pharmacy and if they do they don't stay long. It apparently is still really challenging to hire and keep good pharmacists these days even though it's a buyer's market given the kind of clueless pharmacists who I have had to deal with who STILL work for CVS despite having trouble just verifying scripts.

At CVS YMMV but the pharmacist staffing model in my district is apparently to staff for 2 FTE at 13-hour (or 14-hour) stores regardless of script volume, so the store could do 1,000 a week or 3,000 a week, it doesn't matter. I had a store that sold 2,500 to 2,800 scripts a week this year with 86 pharmacist hours (the store filled more scripts because of unsold RTS). That's 4 hours of overlap. Of course I didn't actually have a staff pharmacist the whole time I was there so I worked on my own anyway. So if there were 550 to fill on a particular day, I cleared all of that by myself (probably filling 150-200 at least myself depending on staffing levels). I had floaters that can only verify 300 a day and are incapable of doing anything else (can't fill, can't input, can't resolve basic third-party issues, can't transcribe an oral script correctly, can't count... etc., etc.).

This is a recipe for disaster in terms of safety and customer service, either because it's not really all that safe to verify 400-550 a day by yourself (considering you have other crap to do, you are verifying more like 50-60 scripts an hour to free up time to do other things), or when you are behind, you are more distracted by customer service issues, leading to increased risk of an dispensing error. I can draw a contrast with Walmart because last week I floated at a Walmart store that is comparable to my previous CVS store in volume. I worked with another pharmacist with 6 hours of overlap and 1 hour of lunch and there were 500+ fills that day. I thought this was luxurious and I laughed when the techs told me they were short a pharmacist so we were forced to do 10-hour shifts to keep up with the volume. And this store even staffs 2 pharmacists on Saturday.

At CVS you have more to do than just verify scripts because of the lack of tech help and pharmacist overlap plus all the other metric management activities that have to be done. I call it metric management because how pointless is it to do NSPU calls on acute scripts for new patients who are obviously not going to pick it up as well as outreach calls on scripts that the patient is obviously not taking anymore because they have a new script for a different dose, because we have all this free time to do proper maintenance of patient profiles.

In my district you were expected to cull NSPU calls AND adherence outreach calls, not just do the calls. (If you just did the calls you would barely get any KPM points because of how non-compliant or demographically transient the patient population is... That is why there is a transient store designation for kpm.) The focus on gaming metrics definitely breeds resentment because you come to despise pharmacists who can't handle the workload, even though not many pharmacists can. Again, I can draw a contrast with Walmart because the #1 most important metric at Walmart (at least in my market) is input accuracy and gaming this metric is highly frowned upon because even though there is a minimum expectation, it is supposed to be a diagnostic first and foremost (you are supposed to send all errors back to input techs). You would think this would be a tracked metric at CVS especially since input verification occurs at the final step, but it's not! Just goes to show where the priorities at CVS lie. I get that the ultimate goal is to sell scripts but running cash loss reports and inactivating past due scripts has nothing to do with that and if for some reason you can't delegate doctor calls to techs that takes away time from you getting scripts out the door on time. (The only real point of doing doctor calls in the vast majority of cases is to do the subsequent action note telling the patient we haven't heard back. 9 out of 10 times it takes too long to talk to someone or they say they will follow up later. The patient has no idea we are supposed to make calls so don't waste your time on this **** when your time is better spent getting the scripts you actually have out the door.)

And obviously who wants to be a pharmacy tech in retail where there is not much room for advancement.

If you are new to CVS you either have to be highly motivated to learn things on your own because of the lack of training (CBLs barely scratch the surface of what you need to know at CVS) or have excellent staff who are willing to teach others and staff who are willing to learn. (Almost everything I learned I learned on my own, and often on my own time.) I have found that the latter is non-existent at stores with high turnover, because only the smart and experienced people quit because they have better prospects and don't want to put up with CVS bull****, leaving the stupid and clueless people and inexperienced people behind. The stupid and clueless people teach the inexperienced people the wrong things and perpetuate bad habits. This leads to a vicious cycle of incompetence that is extremely difficult to break. And if you have outright lazy techs that will just make things even worse.

 

[owlegrad]

For me, what really differentiates CVS from other companies is the lack of manpower and pharmacist workload compared to other companies, doing the most with the least.

When all your staff has a basic level of competency and really understand how everything works, CVS is easy (not that I ever had this). This is difficult to achieve in chain pharmacy in general because ambitious and smart pharmacists don't really go into chain pharmacy and if they do they don't stay long. It apparently is still really challenging to hire and keep good pharmacists these days even though it's a buyer's market given the kind of clueless pharmacists who I have had to deal with who STILL work for CVS despite having trouble just verifying scripts.

At CVS YMMV but the pharmacist staffing model in my district is apparently to staff for 2 FTE at 13-hour (or 14-hour) stores regardless of script volume, so the store could do 1,000 a week or 3,000 a week, it doesn't matter. I had a store that sold 2,500 to 2,800 scripts a week this year with 86 pharmacist hours (the store filled more scripts because of unsold RTS). That's 4 hours of overlap. Of course I didn't actually have a staff pharmacist the whole time I was there so I worked on my own anyway. So if there were 550 to fill on a particular day, I cleared all of that by myself (probably filling 150-200 at least myself depending on staffing levels). I had floaters that can only verify 300 a day and are incapable of doing anything else (can't fill, can't input, can't resolve basic third-party issues, can't transcribe an oral script correctly, can't count... etc., etc.).

This is a recipe for disaster in terms of safety and customer service, either because it's not really all that safe to verify 400-550 a day by yourself (considering you have other crap to do, you are verifying more like 50-60 scripts an hour to free up time to do other things), or when you are behind, you are more distracted by customer service issues, leading to increased risk of an dispensing error. I can draw a contrast with Walmart because last week I floated at a Walmart store that is comparable to my previous CVS store in volume. I worked with another pharmacist with 6 hours of overlap and 1 hour of lunch and there were 500+ fills that day. I thought this was luxurious and I laughed when the techs told me they were short a pharmacist so we were forced to do 10-hour shifts to keep up with the volume. And this store even staffs 2 pharmacists on Saturday.

At CVS you have more to do than just verify scripts because of the lack of tech help and pharmacist overlap plus all the other metric management activities that have to be done. I call it metric management because how pointless is it to do NSPU calls on acute scripts for new patients who are obviously not going to pick it up as well as outreach calls on scripts that the patient is obviously not taking anymore because they have a new script for a different dose, because we have all this free time to do proper maintenance of patient profiles.

In my district you were expected to cull NSPU calls AND adherence outreach calls, not just do the calls. (If you just did the calls you would barely get any KPM points because of how non-compliant or demographically transient the patient population is... That is why there is a transient store designation for kpm.) The focus on gaming metrics definitely breeds resentment because you come to despise pharmacists who can't handle the workload, even though not many pharmacists can. Again, I can draw a contrast with Walmart because the #1 most important metric at Walmart (at least in my market) is input accuracy and gaming this metric is highly frowned upon because even though there is a minimum expectation, it is supposed to be a diagnostic first and foremost (you are supposed to send all errors back to input techs). You would think this would be a tracked metric at CVS especially since input verification occurs at the final step, but it's not! Just goes to show where the priorities at CVS lie. I get that the ultimate goal is to sell scripts but running cash loss reports and inactivating past due scripts has nothing to do with that and if for some reason you can't delegate doctor calls to techs that takes away time from you getting scripts out the door on time. (The only real point of doing doctor calls in the vast majority of cases is to do the subsequent action note telling the patient we haven't heard back. 9 out of 10 times it takes too long to talk to someone or they say they will follow up later. The patient has no idea we are supposed to make calls so don't waste your time on this **** when your time is better spent getting the scripts you actually have out the door.)

And obviously who wants to be a pharmacy tech in retail where there is not much room for advancement.

If you are new to CVS you either have to be highly motivated to learn things on your own because of the lack of training (CBLs barely scratch the surface of what you need to know at CVS) or have excellent staff who are willing to teach others and staff who are willing to learn. (Almost everything I learned I learned on my own, and often on my own time.) I have found that the latter is non-existent at stores with high turnover, because only the smart and experienced people quit because they have better prospects and don't want to put up with CVS bull****, leaving the stupid and clueless people and inexperienced people behind. The stupid and clueless people teach the inexperienced people the wrong things and perpetuate bad habits. This leads to a vicious cycle of incompetence that is extremely difficult to break. And if you have outright lazy techs that will just make things even worse.

I can't even say how much I love this post. So, so true. Well said sir.

 

[samven582]

For me, what really differentiates CVS from other companies is the lack of manpower and pharmacist workload compared to other companies, doing the most with the least.

When all your staff has a basic level of competency and really understand how everything works, CVS is easy (not that I ever had this). This is difficult to achieve in chain pharmacy in general because ambitious and smart pharmacists don't really go into chain pharmacy and if they do they don't stay long. It apparently is still really challenging to hire and keep good pharmacists these days even though it's a buyer's market given the kind of clueless pharmacists who I have had to deal with who STILL work for CVS despite having trouble just verifying scripts.

At CVS YMMV but the pharmacist staffing model in my district is apparently to staff for 2 FTE at 13-hour (or 14-hour) stores regardless of script volume, so the store could do 1,000 a week or 3,000 a week, it doesn't matter. I had a store that sold 2,500 to 2,800 scripts a week this year with 86 pharmacist hours (the store filled more scripts because of unsold RTS). That's 4 hours of overlap. Of course I didn't actually have a staff pharmacist the whole time I was there so I worked on my own anyway. So if there were 550 to fill on a particular day, I cleared all of that by myself (probably filling 150-200 at least myself depending on staffing levels). I had floaters that can only verify 300 a day and are incapable of doing anything else (can't fill, can't input, can't resolve basic third-party issues, can't transcribe an oral script correctly, can't count... etc., etc.).

This is a recipe for disaster in terms of safety and customer service, either because it's not really all that safe to verify 400-550 a day by yourself (considering you have other crap to do, you are verifying more like 50-60 scripts an hour to free up time to do other things), or when you are behind, you are more distracted by customer service issues, leading to increased risk of an dispensing error. I can draw a contrast with Walmart because last week I floated at a Walmart store that is comparable to my previous CVS store in volume. I worked with another pharmacist with 6 hours of overlap and 1 hour of lunch and there were 500+ fills that day. I thought this was luxurious and I laughed when the techs told me they were short a pharmacist so we were forced to do 10-hour shifts to keep up with the volume. And this store even staffs 2 pharmacists on Saturday.

At CVS you have more to do than just verify scripts because of the lack of tech help and pharmacist overlap plus all the other metric management activities that have to be done. I call it metric management because how pointless is it to do NSPU calls on acute scripts for new patients who are obviously not going to pick it up as well as outreach calls on scripts that the patient is obviously not taking anymore because they have a new script for a different dose, because we have all this free time to do proper maintenance of patient profiles.

In my district you were expected to cull NSPU calls AND adherence outreach calls, not just do the calls. (If you just did the calls you would barely get any KPM points because of how non-compliant or demographically transient the patient population is... That is why there is a transient store designation for kpm.) The focus on gaming metrics definitely breeds resentment because you come to despise pharmacists who can't handle the workload, even though not many pharmacists can. Again, I can draw a contrast with Walmart because the #1 most important metric at Walmart (at least in my market) is input accuracy and gaming this metric is highly frowned upon because even though there is a minimum expectation, it is supposed to be a diagnostic first and foremost (you are supposed to send all errors back to input techs). You would think this would be a tracked metric at CVS especially since input verification occurs at the final step, but it's not! Just goes to show where the priorities at CVS lie. I get that the ultimate goal is to sell scripts but running cash loss reports and inactivating past due scripts has nothing to do with that and if for some reason you can't delegate doctor calls to techs that takes away time from you getting scripts out the door on time. (The only real point of doing doctor calls in the vast majority of cases is to do the subsequent action note telling the patient we haven't heard back. 9 out of 10 times it takes too long to talk to someone or they say they will follow up later. The patient has no idea we are supposed to make calls so don't waste your time on this **** when your time is better spent getting the scripts you actually have out the door.)

And obviously who wants to be a pharmacy tech in retail where there is not much room for advancement.

If you are new to CVS you either have to be highly motivated to learn things on your own because of the lack of training (CBLs barely scratch the surface of what you need to know at CVS) or have excellent staff who are willing to teach others and staff who are willing to learn. (Almost everything I learned I learned on my own, and often on my own time.) I have found that the latter is non-existent at stores with high turnover, because only the smart and experienced people quit because they have better prospects and don't want to put up with CVS bull****, leaving the stupid and clueless people and inexperienced people behind. The stupid and clueless people teach the inexperienced people the wrong things and perpetuate bad habits. This leads to a vicious cycle of incompetence that is extremely difficult to break. And if you have outright lazy techs that will just make things even worse.

This post is amazing. Everything what is said is so true. I'm so glad I left CVS