Life Off-Label

I was reading a thread in a pharmacy forum where the original poster complained about being disrespected by some non-pharmacy coworkers. The first thing that comes to my mind is, “Do they act in a way the warrants respecting?” Pharmacists have a very respectable title on their own (don’t get me wrong), but a title only goes so far. All that title says is, “I know a lot about drugs.” 90% of how people respect you comes from how you respect others. It has to be earned through the humility of recognizing that other people are worth respecting for the role they play in your workplace (or other environment). That said, where I worked, the pharmacists had that respect for others, yet sometimes it still wasn’t reciprocated. Nurses and doctors would call and yell at them because this drug is missing or this drug isn’t on the formulary, all while failing to recognize that the pharmacist is working hard trying to get those problems solved.

So then I thought about what else could contribute to this, and I noticed a trend in the way people behaved toward pharmacists. The hospital I worked at had a pretty big decentralized part of the pharmacy department, so a lot of times the pharmacists leave the satellites to go round or at least spend time with the doctors and nurses that work in the units that the pharmacist is in charge of. In our surgical ICU, the top half of the door to the satellite is always open when the pharmacist is there, so doctors and nurses can walk right up with their questions instead of calling. In these situations, I rarely see a nurse or doctor speak in such a rude tone as what I overhear from phone conversations in the other satellites.

With that in mind, I also know that many hospitals (especially smaller ones) are still highly centralized. Pharmacists rarely have that face-to-face interaction with other members of the healthcare team, and I think that’s a big reason why there is some disconnect between pharmacy and everyone else. It isn’t just that we have less patient interaction than doctors and nurses, we have less interaction period.

It’s kind of like how it’s easy to get road rage and flip someone off when we get cut off on the road, but when most of us bump into someone on the sidewalk we’re more polite and understanding. It’s a lot easier for other people to get along when they have to see each other more often in person than it is when our only line of communication is a telephone. And that’s one reason why I think hospitals should continue to evolve in the direction of decentralization. It removes that communication barrier and fosters a better relationship between the pharmacist and the rest of the healthcare team. We become better at respecting each other, and in turn it’ll lead to better care for our patients.