Keeps Getting Worse - Staff Pharmacist CVS Health Employee Review

As a pharmacist you can’t find a more humiliating place to work. I used to have better control over my day. Corporate stopped putting pharmacist in charge and began replacing them with businessmen. And yes I mean men. My boss is so misogynistic and has made all the women feel uncomfortable. Has anyone brought it up to HR ? No, because of a fear of retaliation. It can be retaliation that comes in the form of denied time off, relocation to another store, something subtle enough where you know you’re being punished. When I call out sick I was told I didn’t give them enough notice so I was asked to come in and they would try and find me coverage. Halfway through the day I have to call, hoping they found someone. They always say they tried but no luck. So I just do the entire day. They told us they’re not doing bonuses anymore because we’re being paid too much. We should be happy with our reasonable pay. We are asked to do so much. You can work a 13 hour day and it still wouldn’t be enough time to keep up with your work. Our job is to counsel and check proper filling of medication. With that, we have the other tasks like inventory, scheduling, training, request refills from doctors, and regulatory. All of that gets pushed aside when corporate asks us to make 70 calls in the middle of the work day. They want us making sure the techs are making their phone calls too. These are such unwanted and bothersome phone calls that are the exact definition of telemarketing. They are actually called “patient care calls”. People get annoyed and develop low opinions of the company. We are then told to push flu shots on people. I wish that was an exaggeration. This week our goal is 205 flu shots. We don’t have the extra staff to accomplish this. 205 weekly shots are 30 shots per day. When we don’t reach this goal we are told we are bad pharmacists. Meanwhile we get desperate toward the end of the week when this quota isn’t met. We ask patients to bring their friends in. We ask if we can go into their workplace, schools, and places of worship to do this. None of us are as inefficient as they make us out to be. We work so so hard. You have techs that make close to nothing so we constantly are losing help. When techs find other jobs, they will leave if you’re lucky. Sometimes they tell their other tech friends to join the job with them. You’re then left with no staff. You cannot give them raises to stay. They really have no incentive. I honestly feel bad for them. Some of them struggle when this is their full time job to make ends meet. CVS also has a backwards SLOW system that crashes constantly. You would call IT for assistance and they tell you that your equipment would have to be restarted. That is ALL the assistance you’d get. It’s too bad every single equipment takes 10 minutes to restart. That another 10 minutes added to a sick person’s waiting time. So when the customer puts in this complaint. We are told we are making excuses for poor customer service. We can only work with with what we have. We have people who can work at top speed but get slowed down by our machines. Our “updates” will crash the system at a moments notice, leaving angry customers to go elsewhere. After the crash is over all you got out of that update is slower speed and better graphics. No point in that whatsoever. Our registers have our cashiers look up patients on a touch screen. It’s almost comical how many glitches there are. Because of a fear of complaints you have to be completely responsive to people who ask for the pharmacist. They will demand one over the phone and in person. It’s not like a doctors office where you have to wait to speak to one. You have to walk over as soon as they ask for one. This constant interruption leads to dangerous medical errors. And every pharmacist at cvs has been accused of these type of mistakes. We are reprimanded by corporate and told to do our job better. We told that these interruptions are “excuses”. Most of the patients who ask for a pharmacist don’t even need our help. They just need to be shown where something is, attention, refills, a platform for complaints, feedback on “my” pharmacy, etc. I was once told at the consultation counter to throw our someone’s garbage. When I said there’s a garbage in our bathroom she insisted that I take her coffee cup and banana peel because she doesn’t have time to search for a garbage. So we literally and figuratively takes all kinds of people’s garbage. Because I don’t want to deal with complaints I address all of these concerns. It leaves me no time to fill medication and no time to double check my work. Forget about time to see if the medication is dosed correctly. You’re going to have to hope the doctor made the right choice. When we have sufficient staff we are told we are over staffed. We get in trouble for that. My last point is a well known fact. Pharmacists for cvs do not get time to eat lunch. We are all strung out on coffee and caffeinated beverages. We are on our feet with no time to sit down.