Thursday, October 20, 2005

fill my doctor prescribed medication - or get another job!

I'm still reeling with utter disbelief and disgust over this recent, very ugly trend, where certain pharmacists have suddenly decided that they are going to override a physician's prescription and refuse to fill it due to some personal/religious conviction.

And instead of being relieved of duty, they are getting support from their employers to take this sort of action! You know, I don't really care what a pharmacist's religious conviction is on this matter. It really ought to be very simple. If you can't do your job, then find another one that doesn't interfere with your ability to perform it. It's really none of your business what an MD prescribes to his or her patient. It really isn't any of your business to place a value judgment on what a prescription is for and it ought not to be your right to obstruct in ANY WAY a patient's right to have a prescription filled. At the very least it displays an appalling lack of customer service to require a patient to wait for another pharmacist to fill a prescription or to send them elsewhere. At the very worst it is highly unethical and potentially dangerous.

We are rapidly becoming a nation of childish imbeciles. The very idea that a trained professional, a pharmacist, can suddenly decide to obstruct the Doctor/Patient relationship and interfere in the Doctor's care and plan of action for a patient, is utterly disgraceful and, quite frankly, completely indefensible.

Patients should not be manipulated by another person's religious political maneuvering. For Heaven's sake, grow up or get out of the caregiving field. As for the stores and pharmacies allowing this practice, a boycott seems like an extremely reasonable response for the consumer to take and as much as I like Target, it looks like that is just exactly what I'm going to have to do.

I always assumed that the reasons pharmacy outlets like this existed was to provide patient convenience as an incentive and the advantage to the store that house pharmacies is that they would end up selling more than just prescriptions; I assumed that this would be a pretty lucrative arrangment for both customer and store. But if this kind of behaviour ends up becoming the norm I really cannot believe that it will not have a considerable effect on the revenue to the stores implementing this sort of policy.

What the end result may very well be, is to drive pharmacies back into medical complexes; because I seriously doubt that a hospital/medical center pharmacy would allow this sort of nonsense to go on. I just can't believe that this wouldn't end up being a poor policy for stores to implement due to a significant revenue loss. In any case, if this continues to happen, just watch your pharmacy revenues tank, when millions of women take their prescriptions elsewhere and take their family prescriptions right along with them. I just can't imagine that won't have an impact on these chain store pharmacies.

Link to John at Americablog's righteously on-target rant on the matter via MediaGirl.
Posted by etherealfire :: 10:12 PM :: 4 Comments:

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