CVS will pay $650,000 to resolve prescription medication errors in N.J.
http://www.nj.com/independentpress/index.ssf/2013/02/cvs_nj_division_of_consumer_af.html
From the article:
These incidents took place at five CVS pharmacies in Morris, Union and Camden counties on various dates between Dec. 2011 and March 24, 2012.
As part of its agreement, CVS has retrained staff members, increased oversight and quality assurance measures, in part by providing color images of medications on their website, and contributed $650,000 to the public education campaign. That campaign will remind consumers to check their medication, learn about it through available resources and, whenever they have questions about the medication, to ask their pharmacist or physician. The campaign will also address the dangers of prescription drug abuse.
It states that staff members have been retrained… were they trained in the first place, if so, apparently it did not “stick”.
And now there is going to be an educational campaign to tell the general public that “your Pharmacist makes mistakes… pay attention… different color tabs/caps from one fill to the next… may suggest that your prescription was filled wrong…”
Apparently the NJ Division of Consumer Affairs has admitted that they can’t assure that the people working in CVS pharmacies are competent..
I may have missed it in the article… this agreement seems to touch just about every part of the operation of the Rx dept.. EXCEPT STAFFING LEVELS and other issues that would could be the genesis of a med error.. like maybe working 12-14 hrs without breaks or working several of these days in a row… meaning that the RPH is working on less than 8 hrs of sleep. I guess that that type of interference with the Rx dept operation is tabu
Filed under: General Problems
take a look at the 3rd paragraph…
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cvs-caremark-ceo-addresses-economic-170000436.html
Of course RPH’s are their biggest asset.. their licenses are what keep the stores open..
retraining is just a euphemism for termination. The emphasis on speed has reached the absurd. The new customer surveys ask “how satisfied were you with the time it took for your prescription?” (scale of 1 to 5) If the answer is anything but “five”, the credit given to the pharmacy is actually ZERO. The whole day is like an episode of “Beat the Clock”. (For the youngsters out there, find it on YouTube.) Answer the phone in 20 seconds, listen to the voice mail in less than 15 minutes, fill the “acute” prescriptions in 10 minutes, waiters in 15 minutes, have a wait time/promise time of > 98%. It is a miracle no one has died.
Highly agree with this synopsis it is an outrage and sure as hell a miracle no one has died or yet have they and its swept under the rug just like most mistakes and never released so that maybe other pharmacists or employees could learn from what wrong others have done
We know it’s all BS with these metrics. The CVS I have patronized never offers directly to counsel, and fills their signature log before asking me and my nurse wife if we want counseling. Also, they NEVER fill any Rx in 10-15 minutes….usually they say that afternoon/evening or the next day. That’s the reality. State of Ohio Board seems uninterested in following up.
Ok..make all kinds of misfills and the solution is to post images of pills online so that the consumer can check it to see if it matches what they have in the bottle. And, that is a solution???? What about STOPPING the errors! And, where is the state board of pharmacy on this matter. I thought they were suppose to protect the public. No mention that the board did anything or fined anyone.
I did catch this in the article: “The first incident involved the CVS at 471 Main St., Chatham, when, on a total of 15 occasions, tamoxifen, a breast cancer treatment drug, was mixed with children’s chewable fluoride. The pills are similar in shape and color but had different imprint codes on them.” Children are getting Tamoxifen instead of fluoride? Geez!!!! I wonder what kind of filling system CVS has? At Wal-Mart, we have barcode scanners. The scanner will not accept a bottle, then it is the wrong drug. So, we have very, very few errors.
It is the Division of Consumer Affairs that got after CVS. I checked the state board site and I found no reference to any of these mistakes or any fines. Where are all the agencies that are suppose to be protecting the publics health? What about E-scripts? This is the most flawed system I have ever seen. The number of errors is outrageous. Surescripts and any other e-script provider should be shut down until they can ensure that pharmacies receive correct prescriptions.
I did note that the New Jersey Board of pharmacy is going to look at Remote Processing of Prescriptions (Work at Home) Pre-Proposal – Discussion
on status of proposed regulations. Just my kind of job! Sit at home and work. I can’t wait. :):)