The game of the name
We’ve had a mixed bag of customers this week. I had one customer who came into the pharmacy to talk to me about his medicines after his friend had been ‘so complimentary’ about the advice I had given to her the previous day.
This did give me a bit of lift since it’s always nice to get positive feedback, and he actually wanted to talk through the fact that his GP wanted to switch his atorvastatin to simvastatin (which of course I know all about –see Switch Doctors).
We then had a lady in the pharmacy who was rather irate that we hadn’t supplied her with her usual brand of tamoxifen (she wanted a particular generic brand of the drug).
We tried to explain that we could never guarantee the make of generic that we received from the wholesaler each time, and that this would be the case in most pharmacies, but she was still unhappy and so took the script away to try another pharmacy.
This did give me a bit of lift since it’s always nice to get positive feedback, and he actually wanted to talk through the fact that his GP wanted to switch his atorvastatin to simvastatin (which of course I know all about –see Switch Doctors).
We then had a lady in the pharmacy who was rather irate that we hadn’t supplied her with her usual brand of tamoxifen (she wanted a particular generic brand of the drug).
We tried to explain that we could never guarantee the make of generic that we received from the wholesaler each time, and that this would be the case in most pharmacies, but she was still unhappy and so took the script away to try another pharmacy.
posted by Dee Spencer at 10:41 am
1 Comments:
Hi Dee,
Yes, we have people like the lady you mentioned asking for particular brands. We say to the patient, ask the doctor to write on their records the brand of the generic they want.
We also now write on their notes (in our PMR system) what brand they would like, and have a 'special box' which we can place the brand of generic where patients want. e.g. one with calendar pack; TEVA / Ranbaxy etc.
Then we make sure that the wholesaler(s) we order from have those particular ones (or check at our other branches) so they are there ready for when the patient next comes in.
Do you have such a system in place in your pharmacy?
Hope that helps.
Sachin
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