20 pills Q8 is what?
I was a dick at the pharmacy yesterday. My doctor called in a refill of my Compazine as I’m still on Flagyl, the latter causing nausea. I drove up to the pharmacy window.
Tech: Josh, it’s too early to pick up your prescription. You had a ten-day supply filled on the 27th.
Josh: What’s the dosage on that?
Tech: One pill every eight hours.
Josh: Which is three pills a day. Seven days.
She picked up a calculator.
Tech: Well, to me, seven days is 21 pills.
Which of course just proves my point more.
Josh: OK, six and two-thirds days. I should be able to pick it up.
Tech: The person who put this into the computer put it in as a ten day supply.
Josh: The person who put that into the computer isn’t very good at math.
Tech: (chuckling) I hope it wasn’t me. Can you come back later?
Josh: You know, I’m really up a creek here. I need my Compazine to deal with the nausea from my antibiotics.
So I called later, and spoke to a pharmacist.
Josh: You know, there is a real problem here. If your staff can make this kind of error, then they can make a dosing error with something I give to my child.
Pharmacist: (broken English) No, it was computer error.
Josh: Uh uh. A computer did not divide twenty by three and get ten. A person did that.
Pharmacist: No, sometime computer make mistakes, and we have catch up.
(I’m really hoping her Latin is better than her English.)
Josh: Oh, so the computer made this error, is that right?
Pharmacist: Yes. We have to put numbers in right columns or computer makes mistake. I’m very sorry.
So that’s apparently the definition of a computer error. An “ID-ten-T” error. I think I need a new pharmacy.
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September 11th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Never ever trust a pharmacist. There are bad ones out there just like in any other profession, and the good ones are frazzled. When I get a refill, I check the label and check the marking on the pill to make sure its right.
Hope you’re feeling better.
September 18th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I have a friend who’s a pharmacist. She is slowly understanding that she can’t change the other idiots she works with, and she needs to stop trying. She’s quit more than one job because her colleagues not only couldn’t count, but didn’t care to. She brought up (at a staff meeting) that some were deliberately just throwing pills in a bottle and hoping that no one would care, and all it accomplished is that now everyone there (the idiots) hate her. She quit.