H1N1 Craze....

Nov.7, 2009

So this past month has been super crazy in my pharmacy. This H1N1 craze is really getting out of hand and it's putting such a strain on all the staff in our pharmacy. We are constantly short staffed due to someone having flu like symptoms and once that person comes back to work, another is off. It is a viscious cycle of staff being sick and putting the stress on the remaining workers to run the pharmacy smoothly during this pandemic. I'm not saying I am perfect, i fell ill to the flu last week and was off for a few days. It was hell, but maybe i sorta thought it was a mini vacation away from all of the craziness in the dispensary. We have a walk in clinic about 100m from our store and the head doctor told us months ago to order 200 boxes of Tamiflu because he was going to be writing scripts for it like water. Well, we have already used that supply and just had to order another 150 boxes of the stuff. I think they are overprescibing this medication way too much! Before this year, Tamiflu was hardly ever prescribed and we maybe dispensed 5 rx's for it a year, and all of the sudden, since october, we have dispensed 500+ Rx's of it. In our area, the Tamiflu liquid for children has been on backorder for quite some time (dont even get me started on this backorder shit, like seriously, dont companies prepare for an outbreak like this?) so out pharmacy has been preparing a suspension the old school way by opening up capsules and putting it into a syrup. It takes about 20 minutes to make this suspension and we see about 30 rx's a day for them so you can imagine the time it takes us to deal with that, and the parents freaking our because they don't want to wait the 45 minutes it takes to get it ready. It is especially a huge pain in the ass because all of the other pharmacies in our area will not prepare this so they send them all over to our store with their rx's. It's not like we can prepare a huge stock bottle of the stuff, it is very expensive and is only stable for 14 days refrigerated, so that is another thing that sucks. I still prepare a 250ml bottle of it because we know we will go through that quickly, but now the syrup to make the suspension is on backorder and we ran out of it last night! For the love of god, does nothing go right in pharmacy? It seems like every time you get ahead or are finally dealing with the pandemic, another issue arrises and you go back 10 spaces. It sucks, it really sucks. I'm off this weekend thank god, but i sure hope this H1N1 shit goes away quick!! It took my health for awhile and i think it may soon take my sanity as well. I'd like to hear from you readers how you are dealing with things at your pharmacy and if you are having any problems too. Maybe you have some helpful hints in dealing with this craze? HELPP!?! is anybody out there? Well im done ranting about this, i could go on for days about H1N1 but i will spare your eyes for another time....
Stay healthy and bathe in that hand sanitizer!!
TAPT