“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.
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.
The app seems ungrateful. Stop giving them the pills.
People bitch about everything they don’t understand. Some meds are too fragile to just put into a plastic bottle, or exposed to air.
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.
Same here in Denmark.
The only place I’ve ever seen pills given out of the package is at the vet and in hospitals or by a doctor, and it’s for obvious reasons dictated by circumstances.
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!!!
This is interesting. Do all pills come in blister packs in Denmark? Over in the US it’s actually somewhat rare for prescription medication to come in blister packs. Typically over the counter prepackaged medication will come in blister packs, but prescriptions are almost always unpackaged pills in a bottle. The pharmacist counts out the number of pills and puts them in the bottle as well as attaching its label to match the prescription. Prescriptions are typically written based on pills per day and the number of days to either take the medication or else for the prescription to cover. E.G. the doctor makes out a prescription like “take one pill twice a day for 60 days”, and then the pharmacist will give you a bottle with 120 pills in it.
France: never seen a bottle IRL. Used to be blister packs, and if you needed 21 pills but they came in packs of 20, you got 19 too many and they lived forever in your medicine cabinet.
Now pharmacists are allowed to open packs of antibiotic pills and only dispense the exact number you need, and pics like the OP can happen. Most pharmacies don’t do it though.
Here in the Netherlands I’ve never had any medication that wasn’t in blister packs. They are always full boxes. Boxes have anti-tamper seals and a unique serial number that the pharmacist has to scan when issuing (to prevent fake medication). Pills are individually packaged to prevent contamination.
Almost everything is blister packages, which I personally find a bit annoying.
We can’t even get normal pain killers without them being in blister packages, and we can only buy limited amounts to prevent teen suicide attempts by painkillers.
That part however I’m OK with, because allegedly it’s supposed to actually work. 👍 😀
Honestly, I can see that. A lot of suicides are spur-of-the-moment, and the more a person has to actively work at it, the less likely they are to actually follow through on the attempt. Even just those couple seconds of working at it to get a whole box of blister packs open could be enough for a lot of people to stop, think, and say “actually wait”.
Yes but more than that, the packages are also too small for use for suicide attempts. So you need to stack up with a few packages first too.
It’s a minor inconvenience, but I’m OK with it, because they claim it is actually working.
I never really thought so much about the time it takes to squeeze out the number of pills it takes to work. Which absolutely may be a factor too.
There are bottles as well, but it’s not as common. And they’re factory-produced bottles that are tamper resistant – not like those orange ones in the US. So it’s basically the same safety as blisters, other than its easier for the patient to spill.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think most of the groundwork for this situation is from EU Directive 2001/83/EC. Medical products need to have a lot of information provided, and it just gets simpler to have boxes with blisters to meet all the requirements, and gives safety at the same time.
I can’t imagine how hectic it must be for pharmacy techs in the US. Despite requiring 5 years of school to be a pharmacist here, the job is basically being a glorified cashier… Unless the person has any questions, you simply check their ID, check in the national registry that enough time has passed since their last collection (particularly if it’s a controlled substance), collect a package from the shelf, print out a label to put on the box (containing their name, doctor, dosage, instructions), scan the label and package, collect payment, and that’s it.
A few years ago Germany started to ensure that blisters are not repackaged, too.
It’s so weird to me as here we just get one box of pills and done 🤷
Here we usually do too, unless the doctor prescribes a weird number for some reason.
My doctor doesn’t even prescribe an amount. I just get whatever amount the pharmacy feels like. I’ve gotten a box with 30 pills (one daily so enough for a month), box with 60, back to 30, and the last time they gave me a box with 100. I’m not complaining, less refills so less hassle but it kinda makes me wonder how they decide the amount lol
Here the doctor decides, thank God. It means she can prescribe months worth of meds and I only pay 5 Euro. I always have to pay those 5 Euros for any amount (unless it’s asthma meds, those are free).
I think I pay a flat rate as well, not so sure tho haven’t checked in a while. But just like you it’s a couple of euro so it’s not that bad of a screwover I suppose
I hear you. They should be on a roll, like film 😁
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.
I’m saying that’s exactly what happened.
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.
You are saying what I’m saying, and what everybody else is saying. But with a tone of defending it, as if it can’t be better.
Don’t give any customer your “trash pile”. Either take the time to do it right, or throw away the trashpile, or accept that customers feels like people are saying they feel.
Don’t make up excuses, the things you say you won’t do is not what is needed.
Maybe that’s the problem. Everybody else has figured it out. I know you can’t change that, but lots of people could if they wanted to.
Why doesn’t the customer just take the couple of minutes at the beginning of the month to dispense the blister packs into a daily pill box organizer?
Or just take a pair of scissors and round off the edges?
Just saying the problem is as easily or more easily solved by the customer as it is by the tech.
Certainly no medication should just be thrown out because the packaging is inconvenient. Making the techs take more time just means making the meds more expensive than they already are.
Obviously the real answer is to overhaul the whole system, but we live under an oligarchy here. Individual people have no power past barely the local level.
… You have to give someone the trash pile. Technicians are not going to throw away thousands of dollars of pills a month because the packaging is “MILDLY” frustrating. Your comment reads like a preachy teenager who has all the answers to every problem.
I don’t know why you’re trying to tell me how to do my job when a. you’ve very clearly never done anything remotely adjacent to it and b. Ive said that I don’t even do that job anymore.
In order to remedy this “MILDLY” frustrating problem that happens every so often, the entire distribution network of drugs in the US would need to be reworked from the ground up to start dispensing per-patient packages. Which, if you think that’s the most pressing problem the US medical industry needs to fix… One, I’ve got a bridge to sell you, and two, don’t make up excuses, do it right, get it changed, become a technician and start throwing away pills and refusing to fill people’s scripts with loose blister packs… Be the change you want to see and all that.
AKA pretty much every pharmacy these days, since these pharmacy companies are large enough to own the insurance companies.
What a fucking disgusting mess the US medical industry is.