I’m Glad She Quit
I was a float pharmacist. There was this lady who was a pharmacy assistant. She was dumb as bricks and extremely negligent but hadn’t made enough mistakes to get fired yet.
You would pull up the prescriptions that need to be filled from a queue, scan the bottle, and the label for the patient would print out. If the medication is incorrect, it will tell you that you’re wrong, and the label won’t print.
I could only assume that she scanned the incorrect bottle, went to get the right one, scanned that one, bent down to get a vial, then opened the WRONG bottle and dumped the contents of that one into the vial along with the right one.
The prescription was for 200 tabs, and most bottles are 100 count. She then left it on the counter to get checked. I always open the vial and look at the tabs or capsules to make sure they are right. Since the correct tablets were on top, I opened it, and it looked correct.
What followed next gave me the scare of a lifetime. Later, when the person came to pick it up, the vial was jostled from hanging out in the pickup area. I always open it again to show the person what’s there, which serves as another check for me as well.
Lo and behold, the two medications were mixed together! I apologized and corrected it, but I was furious. She put a high dose of one medication in the bottle, and the person was on a low dose of another.
The patient could’ve had a critical hypoglycemic event because they were old, and both meds make you release more insulin. I told her she wasn’t allowed to put any bottles in recycling anymore; she had to leave everything she touched on the counter.
I also couldn’t ask her to enter prescriptions or do anything else because she was useless. She’d worked there for nine months, and despite close shadowing and training with the best assistants, she just didn’t understand anything. Luckily, she eventually quit.