| rev:text
| - I attempted three times today to get a month's prescription of injectable medication. Each time this pharmacy had failed to fill the prescription properly, and mispriced the prescription.
I called to check that the prescription was properly transmitted from the physician's office and that it was in force. I was assured that it was. I was checked to see if they had the discount card information from the drug manufacturer in their system as before. The tech informed me that that information was no longer in their system.
I ordered a replacement card and brought it with me after I was told the prescription was ready to be picked up. I waited in line for 40 minutes before reaching the drive-through window. The store then attempted to charge me $2,000+ dollars for a one month's supply of the medication (approximately three times the retail value without any discount). I looked up Walgreen's listed price for the medication and it was $750 before any discount card was applied.
The tech was lost and didn't understand the problem or the basis for the discrepancy. The pharmacist came to the window and determined the nature of the problem and told me I would have to come back in a few hours to allow her to correct the problems.
After receiving a call that the medication was ready for pickup, I drove to the window and waited another 30 minutes to get to the window. This time the medication was bagged and delivered with a price tag that didn't agree with Walgreen's list price minus the discount card amount. I asked why the proper discount had not been removed from the price. The tech just shrugged her shoulders and told me that was not her job.
I then asked if the dosage matched the prescription (which I gave the pharmacy months ago), she didn't know and could not figure it out. I asked if she could confirm with the pharmacist that the amount of medication needed matched the one month prescription. After 5 minutes, another tech checked with the pharmacist on duty and confirmed that the box had the proper number of injectors. I told them I would resolve the price error tomorrow when the pharmacist who priced the medication returned to work.
Drove home, opened the injector box and found no needles. It is impossible to administer the medication without the needles. I called the pharmacy, but was on hold for 10 minutes and decided that it was faster to drive back and get the needles. The pharmacy pickup the phone as I pulled into the drive through window. The tech, Joeline, was exasperated and told me that the physician should have written two scripts (which he had and which had been on file before); one for the pen, and another for the needles to apply to the pen to make it a functional pen injector. She claimed that the physician should not have attempted to combine those elements into his instructions as an pen injector. She then blamed me for not checking the physician's script to make sure it was written such that they could understand it.
Any rational pharmacist should have known that this particular injector doesn't come with needles and that a supply of needles matching the number of injections should have been added to the package. Some injector packages pack the needles in with the injector pens. This particular medication has a separate box for the needles. Had the pharmacist done their job and required a separate script for the needles, they should have contacted the physician early in the day and requested a second script. They didn't do that and simply claimed that the script was ready that morning.
Apparently they do not need a second prescription for the needles, as claimed, because the tech offered to give me the 30 needles in three hours. She told me to park in the parking lot and sit there for three hours, or drive back at midnight to pickup the needles. She would not have obtained the second script from the physician's office at 9 PM.
I told her that I thought that sitting around for 3 hours was outrageous; particularly since I had to make three trips to the pharmacy already and had waited some 70 minutes. She simply said she would not go fetch the needles and that I had to follow her instructions and wait another 3 hours. She ended the conversation with a statement that they were too busy filling prescriptions that had been entered after mine, and that this whole problem was caused by my fault.
This is a case of a lack of professional conduct on the part of the pharmacist, who is supposed to check a physician's script for clarity and proper dose before filling it. The techs seemed brainless and didn't understand what they were doing. This level of professionalism and service was very very poor and very time consuming for me and for the pharmacy team; probably explains why there were so far behind. Reworking errors in prescriptions task more than twice the time to fill the script properly.
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