-Walgreens does not care about the safety of their patients or employees. When Covid hit last year, 4 members of our pharmacy staff tested positive. Management threatened to terminate them if they did not continue to work. Management never once had the staff quarantine. They did not have a proper cleaning crew sanitize the pharmacy. I and my coworkers lived in fear constantly due to management’s negligence.
-Our pharmacy was a compounding pharmacy. During the time I worked for Walgreens, I observed all manners of compounding violations, including technicians and pharmacists eating lunch over top of the medication they were making, failure to properly sanitize compounding equipment, use of expired ingredients, substituting one ingredient for another without noting the change on the master compounding record, etc.
-During the time I worked for Walgreens, I observed numerous Medicaid patients who were dispensed one medication, yet the pharmacy billed Medicaid for something different. This was not only fraud. It put patients at risk, because in the event of a recall, we had no record of what was actually dispensed and no way to notify the patient.
-I constantly found expired medication stock bottles of the shelves. Most of the technicians did not bother to check expiration dates when filling prescriptions, and management didn’t care as long as they filled the prescriptions on time.
-When I attempted to address the compounding violations, fraud, and various other safety issues with loss prevention, I was threatened by the head of loss prevention. I was told that if I did not voluntarily resign, Walgreens would lie to the state board of pharmacy to get my license pulled. I believed them because I knew other people this happened to.
-When the big ice storm hit Texas last winter, management forced workers to show up to work the first day, then sent everyone home and closed the store after an hour of being open. The pharmacist that day had driven 2 hours from another city to fill in, only to be told to go home. One of my coworkers fell on the ice and broke his leg. Walgreens refused to let him take a leave of absence. He had to show up every day to work wearing a cast, because they told him he would be fired if he didn’t.
-Walgreens managers do not back up their employees. If an employee is doing their job correctly, following laws and regulations, and a customer gets upset, management routinely apologizes to the customer and gives their employee a write up.
