“How do we ensure our patient drops and loses ~80% of his pills and that he slices the absolute fuck out of his fingers in the process?”
They’re locking my mental health goals behind a fidgety Saw trap built from scissors and miserliness.
I’ve had boxes where there were several single pills snipped from their blister packs rattling around in them. These pills in particular are tiny, like you can’t even feel them in your mouth when you take them, but they expect me to be able to finesse one out of a single blister with at least 3 extremely sharp and piercing corners on it 😒
If you’re a pharmacist and you do this, please go ahead and take the pills yourself, you clearly need 'em more than I do, ya sick fuck.
papalonian@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Uh, former pharmacy tech here… I don’t know what you want us to do. If I have a strip of, say, 10 pills, 2 rows of 5, and I get a prescription for 6 pills, that means I’m gonna have a strip of 4 pills left over. If I get a prescription for 9 pills, there’s gonna be a single one left over. Do you want these pills to just be thrown away? If they don’t have enough pills on hand to make your prescription with the full sheet, would you rather they delay your prescription so they can order some nicer looking ones?
I get that it can be frustrating dealing with those blister packs, but freaking out at the pharmacist/ tech that a. did not put the pills in a blister pack and b. doesn’t have any option but to dispense medication on hand, seems pretty misplaced. Like, I wouldn’t think something was wrong with the Walmart cashier for selling me a pair of scissors in security packaging.
kungen@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
Tbh, a pharmacist shouldn’t really do anything with the actual medication other than dispensing it correctly. In Sweden, every package is individual; the pharmacist should never be opening them nor touching the blisters in normal cases. It significantly reduces risks for the patient and ensures traceability.
It is a bit less efficient though, as pharmacies need to stock up different qualities of the same dosages: Stilnoct(zolpidem) 10mg for example has two different packages: 14 tablets, or 28 tablets. If you have a prescription for 28 tablets, you can’t buy two 14-tablet packages. And if you were to have a 14 prescription, you can’t buy the 28 and ask the pharmacist to throw away the other blister. But I think it’s a worthy tradeoff to eliminate the majority of human mistakes.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Same here in Denmark.
The only place I’ve ever seen pills given out of the package is at the vet and in hospitals, and there they are handled by vets/nurses, and it’s for obvious reasons.
If we need 10 of some pill, they come in boxes of 10. I have no idea wtf is going on with splitting up packages to get 20?
PS: The example with the vet was worm treatment, those pills were in individual blisters, and you can get only one at a time I think due to EU regulation. It was then put in a package made specifically for that. And there were no sharp edges.
We used to get 3 at a time, to administer as needed, but apparently we aren’t allowed to get more than 1 at a time now.
Also the price has trippled to buy 1 compared to what 3 used to cost. So a 10x price jump!!!
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
A few years ago Germany started to ensure that blisters are not repackaged, too.
Noodle07@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s so weird to me as here we just get one box of pills and done 🤷
starlinguk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Here we usually do too, unless the doctor prescribes a weird number for some reason.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
People bitch about everything they don’t understand. Some meds are too fragile to just put into a plastic bottle, or exposed to air.
myplacedk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Order of 6 pills - give a 3x2, you now have a 2x2.
Order 9 pills - give the 2x2 and a 1x5, you now have a 1x5.
I see your problem, but I don’t see how that can turn into “a 10x1, a 4x1, a 2x1 and another 2x1” as your best choice. That looks like he got the left-over-pile after a day of ever order getting from a new pack.
Honestly, I don’t know why you even have to open a package. I’ve never seen that, and I’ve been in some long pharmacy queues. Never been to US though.
If I need exactly 10 pills, I get a box with 10 pills, packed in a factory like any other box of pills.
papalonian@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Things are done very, very differently here than most places. Blister packs are pretty uncommon, as are “per-patient” packages.
We rarely get bottles of 14, 30, 90 or whatever to give to the patient. It’s usually a giant “stock bottle” of like, 100, 500, 1000 pills that get counted out according to the prescription.
Your example of using the leftover from one script to the next works if you’re a single person in a small-ish pharmacy and it’s an uncommon drug, but when you’re one of 4 techs in a shitty retail pharmacy, you’re not going to ask every other person if they have a 2x2 strip of this med in their pile of go-backs, or spend time min-maxing the most efficient way to get the most pills in the least amount of strips. You’re gonna fill the thing as quickly as possible, because the medicine is what’s important, and you’re not gonna hold the backlog of prescriptions up because someone wants the nice complete pack of 10 and not the leftovers that are bound to pile up.
rollerbang@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I hear you. They should be on a roll, like film 😁
WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
The app seems ungrateful. Stop giving them the pills.