When technology fails

In order to keep my practice up while working at the PJ I have recently started locuming at the weekends. Last Saturday I arrived at a pharmacy not far from Heathrow. I merrily started dispensing my first item and clicked for completion but no label appeared. Now, labellers are not my forte and after a while of fiddling around I realised I could not work out how to get it to work.

On further inspection with the help of the counter assistant we discovered that a label was stuck in the machine and, even with lots of poking with pens, paperclips and pins, we just could not get it out —for all the health and safety conscious out there, we remembered to turn it off first.
My next thought was to ask the assistant: “Where’s the spare printer?” To which I got the reply: “There isn’t one.”

At this point I had three customers sat waiting for their prescriptions to be dispensed. The next port of call was the company’s IT department, which told me they’d get back to me asap. So I asked my patients if they would mind coming back in an hour as I was having problems labelling their medicines.

Next I tried to get hold of the store manager and the area manager. In the meantime the IT department got back to me with the news that it takes their engineers over two hours to get a stuck label out so I had no chance; I would need a new printer. Great, I thought as I asked: “When’s it coming?” To which I got the reply: “Tuesday, and that’s a priority”. I’m surprised my jaw didn’t break as it hit the ground. Tuesday, what on earth was I going to do?
So, I started making arrangements with the nearest store that was part of that chain to dispense urgent larger prescriptions for me, and for smaller prescriptions I got out my pen and started writing.

Not having been qualified too long and having had the beauty of IT for the majority of my life, I have never hand-written a label before. Luckily, the in store dispensing system gave me an example of the label I needed to write so I could just copy that. But, needless to say, the process was tedious and time consuming. The labels are tiny and ensuring that my handwriting was neat and large enough, yet managing to fit all the detail on the label was a rather onerous task. I have no idea how pharmacy functioned before the evolution of labellers — dispensing fewer than 50 items a day and with all staff suffering from repetitive strain injury and cramps in their hands I am sure!

Luckily the area manager came to my rescue (thank you!) and collected a labeller for me from HQ and helped me to install it. So, having started at 9am I produced my first printed label at around 2:45pm. I was certainly grateful to put down my pen and leave it to the printer!