Life Off-Label

After working for years at a various positions in various grocery stores, I was pretty confident that I would not like retail pharmacy. I assumed it would be a glorified version of those crappy grocery jobs with the added bonus of dealing with insurance companies, and after putting in over 50 IPPE hours at a couple retail sites between this and last semester, I realized my assumption wasn’t that far off. I haven’t even experienced one of the notorious big chains yet, as I’ve successfully been able to avoid being matched up with one, but the stress of busy, yet adequately staffed independent retail was enough for me.

My theory that hospital pharmacy is better than retail pharmacy has also been supported by my recent start of an internship at a hospital here in Oklahoma. It’s quite a bit smaller than my last hospital, and this one is faith-based whereas the last one was the county hospital for a large city, but as far as pharmacy goes things are pretty much the same. I have similar responsibilities, they use similar drugs on their formulary, the hospital uses the same program for its electronic medical records, the nurses still struggle with finding things they already have, the pharmacists are just as great to work with, and it’s better than retail. I just finished an 8-hour shift and feel much less stressed than I have after 4-hour shifts at my site visits.

It’s not that hospital doesn’t have any stress, but it’s different. Though there are times where you constantly have things to do, and sometimes you are pulled in several different directions with a lot of STAT orders, at some point the intensity of the shift slows down and you get to relax a bit. Not so much with retail. And as much as I used to complain about dealing with nurses who lose medicine all the time, it is SO much better than dealing with an ignorant person who can’t understand anything. At least when a nurse calls because she’s missing something, she knows a lot more about the medication that is missing than “oh I dunno it’s the little green pill”. In retail, that’s a common description for a medicine someone is calling to get refilled, and I’m supposed to take that information and decipher which one it is among their list of 15 or so prescriptions. Do they by any chance know what it’s used for? What letter does it start with? Nope. It’s just that little green pill. Additionally, in a hospital I don’t have to deal with insurance, I don’t have to try to translate the chicken scratch on a hand-written prescription, and I don’t have to sit on hold with Walgreens for 33 minutes trying to get a prescription transferred from them (yes that really happened… I had the time to count).

So yeah, I was about 85% sure that I want to work in a hospital after I graduate, but now that’s been promoted to 95%. I have a site visit at an anticoagulation clinic later this semester, and that sounds like something that could be really interesting, so a tiny part of me is still remaining open to the idea of something else winning my heart over. But I can guarantee one thing… it won’t be retail.