What if They Don't Have Someone?

   The phone rang on Sunday morning. I rushed to get it. No one calls us on Sunday morning. It had to be some kind of emergency.
   It was Evie, my adopted grandmother. She was sorry to call me on a Sunday and disturb us as we were getting ready for church. She had a question.
   She gets her medications delivered to her from her pharmacy. On Saturday something was delivered to her. It was a new medication. She didn't know what it was.
   She was puzzled about why she got it. Her doctor's appointment wasn't for a few weeks. The name of the doctor on the prescription was one she did not know. She had heard that there were a couple of female doctors in the clinic that she goes to, but she had never seen any of them.
   She told me the name of the medicine.  Fortunately is was a common one, so I told her what it was. I also recommended to her that she call her doctor on Monday and find out why she got this prescription. I also told her not to take it until she found out why she had received it.
   I was really bothered by this. What if she had taken the medicine without even thinking about it? It would have interacted with her other medications and might have made her sick. What if there had been a mistake at the doctor's office?
   What bothered me even more was what about those people who don't have someone they can call? They can call their pharmacy, but the pharmacy could only tell them that something had been called in.  They might not call the doctor to check on why it had been called in. Many pharmacies are just too busy and can't spend that kind of time.
   These are the things that scare me as a pharmacist. With smaller patient centered pharmacies being absorbed by larger corporate pharmacies, things like this can happen and not get caught. When you're doing a few hundred prescriptions a day with very little tech help (because the company wants to keep payroll costs down) there isn't time to get to know your patients let alone call a doctor if a prescription comes in that might be questionable.
  I'm grateful that Evie has me to help her and that she calls me when she has a question. Hopefully I'll find a job at a pharmacy where when someone has a question or a problem,they will have someone to call.