I stayed home from Church with Jacob today. He was running a fever and complaining of a sore throat. When he still wasn't feeling any better this evening I took him to KidsCare in Bountiful. The quick test for strep came back (in the words of the doctor) "very positive." She wrote a prescription for Amoxicillin, which we took to Walgreens (one of the only pharmacies open around here on a Sunday evening).
I've never encountered any pharmacy [in America] that I'd consider really fast (< 5 minutes) or efficient. Today when we went through the Walgreens drive thru, the pharmacist told us they'd have it ready in 25-30 minutes and to come back then.
There were no other cars in line & no patients visible inside. Why does it take them so long to fill one small bottle? It's a liquid, so it ought to be easier to measure than counting out individual pills. Given that it is the season for strep (and the standardized dosage doctors prescribe for kids) you'd think they could even have bottles pre-filled.
Is there some law or industry norm that says all pharmacies must be slow and make sick patients wait? It's not like Amoxicillin is a hard narcotic where they might want to double check the validity of the prescription. So what do they spend all that time doing?
Maybe Paul will find out when he starts his pharmacy program in Georgia later this year...
—Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, January 06, 2008 at 22:43
Yes, there is a law. Few people know about the federal government mandate regarding prescription wait times. In 2004 Congress passed and George Bush signed an act requiring at least a 20 minute wait time for a customer to receive a prescription. The reason given was that if sick people were kept waiting for their medicine, they would be less likely to think about the mess in Iraq, giving the administration a free hand to continue the war indefinitely.
I usually spend the 19 minutes not involved in actually filling your prescription surfing the internet for pornography. I would really like to not have to do this, but the law is the law you know....
I actually had a bit of a blogosphere hit writing about this very subject. Take a look and see Paul's future: http://drugnazi.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-realize-today-ive-done-you.html
Walgreens especially is notorious for being slow. I don't know why.
I'm on very good terms with my pharmacists, and my experience is that what takes time is not dispensing but using the computer: checking and updating my records, verifying against the insurance company's system (this is about the slowest single item), updating the inventory for the number of pills dispensed. If your prescription is on paper, it also has to be transcribed by hand. There may also be a queue of called-in scripts that have to be filled, and there are background tasks like talking to suppliers that also consume time.
Finally, it's better customer service to predict a long delay and than execute faster than predicted than the converse. I often get told "20 minutes" and have my meds in ten.