A lot of retail pharmacies are understaffed to the point that they can’t keep up with demand, this is because of set budget by corporate who do not allow us to go over the budgeted hours without a district or even regional manager’s approval. They want it like this, because they’re buying up so many healthcare companies and need to keep operating expenses down to make the purchase look ‘good’. So we literally can not fill as quickly as prescriptions are coming in.

We try to get the more important things done like antibiotics, but when you have hundreds of scripts from the previous day in the list of scripts to count it’s sometimes very difficult to take the time to go through the list to print and do those first. This doesn’t sound difficult, but remember that there’s a line at the pickup window, drive through won’t stop, there are 5 calls waiting to be answered (not including office calls, most places try to answer those as soon as we can) appointments for shots every hour plus walk-ins every fifteen to 30 minutes, and there’s only 3 people to do all this because that’s what the allotment of hours allows per corporate expected demand. We can not schedule over this expected demand, it literally prevents you from finishing a schedule week unless it’s under the allotted hours. Some stores tell colleagues to come in extra, and the pharmacy managers get reamed out when they do this unless it allows us to increase our script volumes in a meaningful way. This does not happen often.

The system isn’t smart enough to see how behind the location is, so it’ll put in a time where it should be ready. When a patient puts an order for a refill in, they select the time. Most likely a store will already be up to a couple days behind (yes, this is commonplace right now, I’m not exaggerating). So a patient will go in and be surprised to see that it’s not ready. Yes, it would be fantastic if the system could tell patients that it’ll be late or will take longer than usual, and to expedite it on the app or contact the pharmacy, but that would be something that corporate isn’t willing to do, or they’d have already done this.

As for why we may not get an order? Most likely the eRX systems malfunctioned and never got to us. It’s just as likely to see a struggling office not send it, either. In my area we have a few problem practices that do this.