“How do we ensure our patient drops and loses ~80% of his pills and that he slices the absolute fuck out of his fingers in the process?”
They’re locking my mental health goals behind a fidgety Saw trap built from scissors and miserliness.
I’ve had boxes where there were several single pills snipped from their blister packs rattling around in them. These pills in particular are tiny, like you can’t even feel them in your mouth when you take them, but they expect me to be able to finesse one out of a single blister with at least 3 extremely sharp and piercing corners on it 😒
If you’re a pharmacist and you do this, please go ahead and take the pills yourself, you clearly need 'em more than I do, ya sick fuck.
Uh, former pharmacy tech here… I don’t know what you want us to do. If I have a strip of, say, 10 pills, 2 rows of 5, and I get a prescription for 6 pills, that means I’m gonna have a strip of 4 pills left over. If I get a prescription for 9 pills, there’s gonna be a single one left over. Do you want these pills to just be thrown away? If they don’t have enough pills on hand to make your prescription with the full sheet, would you rather they delay your prescription so they can order some nicer looking ones?
I get that it can be frustrating dealing with those blister packs, but freaking out at the pharmacist/ tech that a. did not put the pills in a blister pack and b. doesn’t have any option but to dispense medication on hand, seems pretty misplaced. Like, I wouldn’t think something was wrong with the Walmart cashier for selling me a pair of scissors in security packaging.
It’s so weird to me as here we just get one box of pills and done 🤷
Here we usually do too, unless the doctor prescribes a weird number for some reason.
My doctor doesn’t even prescribe an amount. I just get whatever amount the pharmacy feels like. I’ve gotten a box with 30 pills (one daily so enough for a month), box with 60, back to 30, and the last time they gave me a box with 100. I’m not complaining, less refills so less hassle but it kinda makes me wonder how they decide the amount lol
Here the doctor decides, thank God. It means she can prescribe months worth of meds and I only pay 5 Euro. I always have to pay those 5 Euros for any amount (unless it’s asthma meds, those are free).
I think I pay a flat rate as well, not so sure tho haven’t checked in a while. But just like you it’s a couple of euro so it’s not that bad of a screwover I suppose
People bitch about everything they don’t understand. Some meds are too fragile to just put into a plastic bottle, or exposed to air.
The app seems ungrateful. Stop giving them the pills.
I hear you. They should be on a roll, like film 😁
If I have a strip of, say, 10 pills, 2 rows of 5, and I get a prescription for 6 pills, that means I’m gonna have a strip of 4 pills left over. If I get a prescription for 9 pills, there’s gonna be a single one left over. Do you want these pills to just be thrown away?
Order of 6 pills - give a 3x2, you now have a 2x2.
Order 9 pills - give the 2x2 and a 1x5, you now have a 1x5.
I see your problem, but I don’t see how that can turn into “a 10x1, a 4x1, a 2x1 and another 2x1” as your best choice. That looks like he got the left-over-pile after a day of ever order getting from a new pack.
Honestly, I don’t know why you even have to open a package. I’ve never seen that, and I’ve been in some long pharmacy queues. Never been to US though.
If I need exactly 10 pills, I get a box with 10 pills, packed in a factory like any other box of pills.
That looks like he got the left-over-pile after a day of ever order getting from a new pack.
I’m saying that’s exactly what happened.
Never been to US though.
Things are done very, very differently here than most places. Blister packs are pretty uncommon, as are “per-patient” packages.
We rarely get bottles of 14, 30, 90 or whatever to give to the patient. It’s usually a giant “stock bottle” of like, 100, 500, 1000 pills that get counted out according to the prescription.
Your example of using the leftover from one script to the next works if you’re a single person in a small-ish pharmacy and it’s an uncommon drug, but when you’re one of 4 techs in a shitty retail pharmacy, you’re not going to ask every other person if they have a 2x2 strip of this med in their pile of go-backs, or spend time min-maxing the most efficient way to get the most pills in the least amount of strips. You’re gonna fill the thing as quickly as possible, because the medicine is what’s important, and you’re not gonna hold the backlog of prescriptions up because someone wants the nice complete pack of 10 and not the leftovers that are bound to pile up.
You are saying what I’m saying, and what everybody else is saying. But with a tone of defending it, as if it can’t be better.
Don’t give any customer your “trash pile”. Either take the time to do it right, or throw away the trashpile, or accept that customers feels like people are saying they feel.
Don’t make up excuses, the things you say you won’t do is not what is needed.
Things are done very, very differently here than most places.
Maybe that’s the problem. Everybody else has figured it out. I know you can’t change that, but lots of people could if they wanted to.
Why doesn’t the customer just take the couple of minutes at the beginning of the month to dispense the blister packs into a daily pill box organizer?
Or just take a pair of scissors and round off the edges?
Just saying the problem is as easily or more easily solved by the customer as it is by the tech.
Certainly no medication should just be thrown out because the packaging is inconvenient. Making the techs take more time just means making the meds more expensive than they already are.
Obviously the real answer is to overhaul the whole system, but we live under an oligarchy here. Individual people have no power past barely the local level.
Don’t give any customer your “trash pile”. Either take the time to do it right, or throw away the trashpile, or accept that customers feels like people are saying they feel.
… You have to give someone the trash pile. Technicians are not going to throw away thousands of dollars of pills a month because the packaging is “MILDLY” frustrating. Your comment reads like a preachy teenager who has all the answers to every problem.
I don’t know why you’re trying to tell me how to do my job when a. you’ve very clearly never done anything remotely adjacent to it and b. Ive said that I don’t even do that job anymore.
In order to remedy this “MILDLY” frustrating problem that happens every so often, the entire distribution network of drugs in the US would need to be reworked from the ground up to start dispensing per-patient packages. Which, if you think that’s the most pressing problem the US medical industry needs to fix… One, I’ve got a bridge to sell you, and two, don’t make up excuses, do it right, get it changed, become a technician and start throwing away pills and refusing to fill people’s scripts with loose blister packs… Be the change you want to see and all that.
Blister packs should be illegal. Creates waste. All pills should come in recyclable plastic bottles.
Many medicines need a hermetically sealed environment for storage. They break down from moisture in the air, being exposed to oxygen for a prolonged time can cause the active ingredients to break down. Even some of the binders and stabilizers can grow bacteria and mold.
Like bro this person can’t figure out that we have tools for cutting things open? Scissors? Nail clippers? Small blade? Hobby knife?
Could also use a nail file on the sharp edges, or use the curved nail clippers to clip the sharp point. Seems like a lot of solutions to me
There a few many reasons why plastic bottles aren’t the best option for some medications and it comes down to the technical specifications of the drug as well as drug safety regulations.
Iirc, bottles aren’t optimal for formulations that result in friable (brittle) tablets, or those that need to be packaged in a reduced oxygen environment so that you can take out a tablet individually without exposing all the others to regular air, and so that they’re easy to handle and transport individually without exposure to contaminants in the environment up to the moment that they need to be ingested.
I encourage people to look deeper into pharmaceutical technology. It’s a fascinating field full of surprises.
This is likely the fault of the pill manufacturer who the pharmacy is at the mercy of.
Here in my country (at least public healthcare, which my mother and I use, and the private provider my grandfather uses), pharmacists give you enough full boxes to cover the month, even for controlled substances, even if that means giving a few extra pills.
As an example, I take 1 ½ Risperidone pills daily, which makes 45 pills a month. Boxes are 20 pills each, so they give me 3 boxes (60 pills). The leftovers helped me a couple of times I was sick or otherwise couldn’t get the refill on time.
There was only one time where they gave me two boxes and a blister (50 pills), but it was still a full blister.
Same here in Germany. I’m pretty sure, cutting and repackaging pills would be illegal.
Here in Sweden, I’m pretty sure pills are only distributed individually like that in controlled settings (elder care facilities, etc). Otherwise you just get the whole box.
In Japan, this is the norm. They’ll throw each drug in its own zip lock bag but piecemeal like that is all you’ll get. And people grow really old over here.
I don’t find this mildly infuriating. I think this is a responsible way to deal with a precious resource.
I just wanted to say, I enjoy your writing style. You very vividly illustrated your emotions
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“they may provide a shitty product, but have you considered their feelings?”
You’re allowed to be pissed off, even when other people do their best.
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And yet it’s still ok to be pissed off at the situation.
Is the problem that he insulted the pharmacist in his rant?
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Eh… I see what you mean, and agree. I read it differently at first.
Cut around the edge of the cup part of the blister with a razor, with the blade against the of the flat part of the circle.
Or just around the circle of foil from the other with something with a point. Sometimes the tip of a safteypin will do
I’ll raise you the time I decided to be menace and put a blister pack back in the pyxis like this:
(to be clear, this was neither a high alert med nor a narcotic)
STFU bitch.
Oh neat, a hater in the wild.
Oh neat. Another shitty bitch that can’t handle a single minor inconvenience. Please stay out of the wild. We don’t need that regulated.
:) cute, need a handout to refill those meds?
Bruh you’re in mildly infuriating, you lost?
