Although this has been said before, community pharmacy is not a fast food restaurant
Having worked in a community pharmacy for six months now, I have noticed first-hand the impatience of some patients when requesting their medicines as though pharmacy is a fast food restaurant.
One group of people are those who have come into a pharmacy for the first time. The prescription is handed to the pharmacist who, along with the dispenser, is doing several things at once in the dispensary and the patient is advised of a rough waiting time and to shop around or come back in a few minutes or so. Nevertheless, most of these patients would wait right behind the prescription-handling counter and would not even sit down even when there is no one in the pharmacy at the time.
Five to 10 minutes later, depending on how long they have their car parking ticket valid, they will ask about their prescription. If it is not ready they will either continue waiting at same spot or say that they will take their prescription elsewhere because they will get a parking fine if it is not done this instant.
I often think that they could have looked around the shop or put some more money in the meter when the waiting time was quoted. And since when has it become the pharmacy’s responsibility to ensure we get prescriptions done so that a patient doesn’t have to put more money into a parking meter or get a fine?
However, they think that if they stand at the counter, their medicines will be dispensed quicker. If only they understood the clinical checks and correct endorsements that need to be undertaken for each prescription. It is extremely frustrating when some patients do not understand or appreciate the process of dispensing a prescription safely.
Another type of patient that makes our job challenging are those on the repeat prescription service, where the pharmacy collects their prescriptions from GP surgeries. Most of the time, patients comes in at the correct time and their medicines are ready for collection. But on the few occasions that it is not ready or the prescription is not back from the surgery yet, it is a different story. The pharmacy has to investigate if and when the prescription was requested.
Sometimes, after looking through the patient medication record system, we discover that they had come in too early and were not due for their repeat prescription for another week. This could be because they have lost a few tablets, they have taken more medicines than they should or, even worse, they might have been sharing medicines with someone else in the family. Perhaps some just show up at the pharmacy early because they think they can and it is convenient for them to pick up their medicines at that time.
Sometimes patients would say that they have no tablets left and expect an emergency supply as though they were asking for extra fries. One patient even sent his daughter for an emergency supply to our pharmacy because he had run out of his diabetic medicine 10 days ago and was supposed to telephone the pharmacy and request more through the prescription collection service but was “too busy”.
A pharmacist is responsible for dispensing the correct medicine so time is required to achieve this. Just how much public education is required to make people understand that we do not deliberately give long waiting times for fun and that we are here to dispense their medicines accurately and safely?
Dawar Qhoraish is a third-year pharmacy student at Kingston University
