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LOL why does this always happen. Like, do people think pharmacy is just playing at being part of healthcare? Do you want cat dander injected into patients veins? Because that’s what happens when you have compounding in non-sterile gowns.

Don’t worry, this situation resolved after an email, before we compounded anything. But this kind of thing wouldn’t be a problem if physicians and nurses had just one week in pharmacy as students. Just one day compounding and dispensing. Most of the rest of the team has just no idea what the compounding area even looks like.

When we have students on rotation again, consider sending yours to the pharmacy for a day, and just think, years in the future, they won’t be the ones suggesting procedures that will lead to injections of cat dander.

White Blood Cell: *brutally murdering an antigen in the background* DIE, GERM!

Yes, they do it!!

Acinetobacter

Streptococcus pneumoniae

Extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBLs)

Enterococcus

Staphylococcus aureus

Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Enterobacteriaceae

Shigella

Neisseria gonorrhoeae

Candida

Campylobacter

Tuberculosis

Salmonella

I don’t want you to distrust your team because I talk about errors. Errors are notable to talk about because they’re so relatively rare, and errors discovered in the pharmacy prior to dispensing are not a big concern. We’re all scrutinizing your medications over and over by multiple highly trained professionals before they get to you. Every highly trained professional is human, and we know it, and that’s why we have multiple humans searching for the mistakes. If you’ve learned this by following me, I hope you can be patient with the wait when filling your prescriptions. It takes time to review medical literature when necessary, check storage conditions, and call your prescriber to understand their clinical reasoning. Trust that part of the system, and give your business to independent, managed care, or slower pharmacies that allow pharmacists the time to take really good care of you.

Right now I’d say that 1/4 of the physicians who I work with introduce themselves by their first names, which feels so respectful to me. I really love it. We’re both doctors and yes you’re the captain of the team and my residency was shorter but between professionals (and not in front of patients) we’re both doctors. Going by first names feels much more collaborative to me.

The funny thing is how you can tell that the first name doctors weren’t trained to communicate like that. I make calls all the time and I’m like, “Hi this is Deca,pharmacist, looking for—“

I’ve taken a couple of phoned orders lately from confident physicians where I get the patient’s identifying info, clarify the drug, finish the conversation, hang up, then go, “Wait, who the fuck is Amy?” Amy (or Sarah or Tahir) just spoke like a physician and the whole interaction was so normal that I didn’t even think about how I didn’t clarify whether or not she was a physician. It took some polling the pharmacy and picking through the chart to find out who I took an order from. They didn’t know that they had to identify their role in addition to their names.

I just think it’s adorable, and I really want to encourage the trend so I haven’t told any of my physician colleagues. Soon I’ll know all of their first names as well.