Interesting tidbit of information about chain pharmacies

My best friend has a friend who is a Walgreens regional manager. He too deals with CP and his friend told him, when he was recently shorted an oxycodone at another pharmacy, that most chain pharmacies have a 5% error margin for even scheduled medications.

So, if they dispense 100,000 oxycodones per month, 5000 can go "missing" without repercussions from corporate. My guess is that so long as the percentages remain below that threshold, they don't report the "loss" to the DEA.

Interesting that we as CP patients aren't extended the same 5% margin....

Just sayin'...


Merrida

My friend who was shorted a pill was also (from the same pharmacy) shorted one other time, a while back. Of course, he couldn't prove anything, but did let them know.

We've all discussed counting out our meds -- but hardly does anyone want to go through the embarrassment of doing that right in the store. However, CVS has made their mistakes with me as well, the most egregious was filling a script for 300mg Tramadol ER with 200mg.

Ha! Chart, I've always called him Cognito and until you pointed that out, that's what I thought it was! I'm sorry about that Cogito!

I find that 5% margin for error very interesting! I bet its not that way with balancing their cash drawers at the end of the night! Probably cause it just affects us and not them $$. The only issue I've ever had was when they gave me 30 pills too many and it was the pharmacy downstairs from my PC. But I've heard stories of people being denied their scripts and every time its been a Walgreen's.

Hi all,

The 5% I THINK (I work at Walgreens in the pharmacy) is because of those pills that may be dropped or are broken in the bottle - surprisingly common, especially for a few certain drugs. Those pills later have to be sent in to be destroyed every so often.

Controlled meds are ALWAYS double counted to verify that the patient is getting the right amount of meds, and if it's from a counting machine we still hand-count once to verify. Other automated meds are supposed to be double checked regularly to make sure that they are counting properly. Because of how the sensors work, they very rarely will undercount - when they get pill dust on them they sometimes don't count some pills as they go by, which causes more pills than planned to be sent out.

And at my store we do have a couple people that will count at our counters, and others that tell us to double count all their meds and will count themselves when they get home and call us right away if there is a problem (One recently called to say one pill had a nick in it's side and she wanted a replacement, although we've not had an issue with them from what I know of with shorting).

Now I'm not saying there are not mistakes where people get the wrong amount - it does happen, and it's the most frequent mistake after direction misspellings, at least from my experience.