The latest worker shortage may affect your health: Pharmacies don’t have enough staff to keep up with prescriptions
Pushed to the breaking point, pharmacy technicians are quitting in waves and stores are struggling to hire, leading to shorter hours, delayed prescriptions and risky mistakes.
Heidi Strehl worked as a pharmacy technician at a Rite Aid in the Pittsburgh suburbs for more than 16 years. She loved her customers, enjoyed her job and thought of her co-workers as family. But this fall, Strehl abruptly quit, walking out in the middle of a shift — one of many in a wave of pharmacy technicians who are doing the same.
Most of the people behind pharmacy counters who count pills and fill medication bottles are pharmacy technicians, not pharmacists — low-wage workers in positions that don’t require college degrees. Working in a pharmacy was always fast-paced, Strehl said, but in recent years the workload and stress had increased to unsustainable levels, while staffing and pay failed to keep up. During the coronavirus pandemic, the pace quickened further, especially once pharmacies began giving Covid-19 vaccine shots. Her store regularly ran behind on prescriptions, often with several hundred waiting to be filled each morning.
“It got to the point that it was just such an unsafe working environment, where you are being pulled a thousand different directions at any given time,” she said. “You’re far more likely to make a mistake and far less likely to catch it.”
The last straws for her came in October. Strehl said she got an “insulting” 25-cent raise, bringing her to $15.08 an hour. A few days later, after yet another customer yelled at her over a delayed prescription, she had a panic attack in a corner of the pharmacy, crying and struggling to breathe while work continued around her. Then she grabbed her things, hugged her co-workers and walked out for the last time.
“I always thought I would retire from that place,” Strehl said. “But all of the parts of my job that I truly enjoyed over the years had slowly just gone away.”
Strehl is one of about 420,000 pharmacy technicians in the U.S. Even though they aren’t highly paid — the median pay is $16.87 per hour — and often have no pre-employment medical training, they are vital to the health care system. They help pharmacists fill and check prescriptions and make sure patients get the right medication in the right amounts at the right time. Some even give vaccinations.
In recent months, many technicians have quit, saying they’re being asked to do too much for too little pay, increasing the possibility that they will fill prescriptions improperly.
Employers, from major drugstore chains like Rite Aid, CVS and Walgreens to mom-and-pop pharmacies and even hospitals, are struggling to replace them. It’s yet another of the labor shortages that have gripped the country this year. At many drugstores, the pharmacy staff members who remain are stretched thin. The shortage has led to dayslong waits for medication, shortened pharmacy hours and some prescription errors and vaccination mix-ups — like children receiving an adult Covid-19 vaccine shot instead of a flu shot — in a business sector in which delays and mistakes can have serious health consequences.
“Over the last five to six months, we’ve seen a spike in these conditions,” said Al Carter, the executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, a nonprofit organization that represents state pharmacy regulators. “In some states you have 60 or 70 pharmacies that are closing for days on end, because they don’t have the appropriate staff.”
While the shortage of technicians is being felt throughout the pharmacy industry, Carter said retail pharmacies, which have some of the lowest-paying positions in the industry, have been hit the hardest.
NBC News spoke to 22 retail pharmacy technicians in 16 states who recently quit or were considering quitting their jobs at major retail chains. Their experiences echoed Strehl’s. Workload rose dramatically during the pandemic, but staffing levels didn’t, with many stores instead losing workers and struggling to fill positions, compounding stress and burnout. All of the technicians said patient safety was their biggest concern.
“Being consistently overworked, underpaid, stressed out and behind, there’s room for way too many mistakes,” said Bella Brandon, who left her technician position at a CVS in Ohio in July without having another job lined up because she was so concerned about the potential for a deadly medication error.
“I had to get out of there as soon as possible,” said Brandon, who now works in a hospital pharmacy with higher pay and more staff members. “It’s not my job to play God.”
Rite Aid, CVS and Walgreens all said they are proud of their staff members’ work during the pandemic and are taking steps to support them, including major hiring efforts, often with signing bonuses. Rite Aid said it was temporarily closing most pharmacies an hour early to alleviate stress and help staff members catch up on work. Walgreens said that when staffing shortages affect stores, it may temporarily adjust store hours. CVS said its teams “remain flexible in meeting patients’ needs” during the national workforce shortage.
Both Walgreens and CVS recently announced that they would increase technicians’ starting salaries to $15 an hour or more. In a statement, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores lauded the work technicians do and encouraged consumers to make vaccination appointments ahead of time to help manage workflow in busy pharmacies.
‘Not a cheeseburger’
Pharmacies can’t run without technicians, who do the lion’s share of work behind the counter, from counting pills to taking phone calls and ringing patients up. While anyone can become a technician, filling prescriptions is a complex process, more than two dozen technicians and pharmacists said. It takes months of training about drug interactions, insurance claims and more to become skilled and efficient. Many states and employers require technicians to earn certifications after a certain number of months of work, as well.
Pharmacists, who have doctorates and make six-figure salaries, check technicians’ work, consult with doctors, counsel patients and give vaccination shots. During the pandemic, many states began allowing technicians to give vaccination shots, as well, but everywhere, pharmacists and technicians said, the expectations for both jobs have been increasing.
“In an unsafe environment — because of the shortage of staff and increased workload that is being presented to that staff — your chance for error is going to increase,” Carter said. “When you’re dealing with medications, any prescription error could be life or death.”
As the pressure has mounted, mistakes have increased, technicians said. They, their pharmacists or their patients are catching more miscounts of pills, mislabeled doses, even medications packaged in the wrong person’s bag. Regulators are getting more complaints about prescription errors, as well, Carter said.
In statements, CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens all said that patient safety is their top priority and that they have systems to ensure that prescriptions are filled safely and accurately.
Filed under: General Problems
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