Pharmacy work is a tough job, according to Amanda Applegate with the Kansas Pharmacists Association. There are, of course, many prescriptions to fill. Filling those also means keeping in mind whether the prescribed medication is best for the patient, whether it is covered by their insurance and more.
And it gets more difficult when it’s inside a bustling retail store, like Walgreens or Target. That’s a recipe for a hectic job.
“If you are in a hospital environment, you don’t necessarily have somebody walking by you and asking where the steaks on sale are or where the Tylenol is,” Applegate said. “There is an additional layer of distraction.”
Applegate said retail pharmacists and pharmacy technicians also struggle with performance quotas set by their employers.
A STUDY by professors at the University of Kansas illustrates the differences between pharmacy work in retail and independent or hospital settings.
The study, recently published in the Journal of American Pharmacists Association, surveyed 129 pharmacists and 111 pharmacy technicians at both retail and independent pharmacies in Kansas and Missouri.
Angela Gist-Mackey was the lead author of the paper. Her team began collecting data in 2019 and finished in 2020, just before the pandemic. Survey participants were categorized into three pharmacy settings: retail, independent and health care systems.
Going into the study, Gist-Mackey hypothesized that a person’s role in a pharmacy would determine their overall satisfaction.
“But surprisingly, that was not the case. Role didn’t predict any of that,” Gist-Mackey said. “In fact, it was more of the context that people were working in.”
The survey showed that pharmacy workers in retail situations, though paid the same as their independent or hospital pharmacist counterparts, were far less satisfied with pay and benefits.
“Maybe it’s because what I have to put up with in my chain pharmacy workplace doesn’t seem worth the pay,” Gist-Mackey said.
Applegate agrees. She now serves as director of practice development for the Kansas Pharmacists Association, but she previously worked in the retail pharmacy field for more than a decade. Applegate said the workload at retail pharmacies can often be hard to handle, especially because a lot of retail pharmacies only staff one pharmacist at a time and don’t schedule enough technicians to help.
Retail workers on strike
Concerns about working conditions, pay and staffing came to a head this fall, when workers at CVS and Walgreens stores across the nation walked out. At least a dozen CVS locations in the Kansas City metro, on both sides of the state line, shuttered temporarily while workers were on strike.
Applegate said work safety was one of the No. 1 priorities for striking workers. She said sometimes, retail pharmacists have up to 1,000 prescriptions to fill and not enough support to safely fill them. In addition, they often work long hours without breaks.
