Is that a date, then?

I recently worked a Saturday at a pharmacy that had a branch close by - let's just say it was one of the many multiples. There were only the two pharmacies in the town. The afternoon became fairly quiet and the staff decided to have a grumble about the previous week's events. It seemed that they had been provided with a second pharmacist from abroad (European Union national, to narrow it down a bit), who had been trained up to what was deemed UK standard and was taking over the other branch as pharmacist/manager the Monday following.

The pharmacist had taken it upon herself to completely rearrange the dispensary (which had been in it's existing layout for some years) so that "it would be easier to find things" and that "any locum will be able to find stock easily". This included moving a set of shelves containing "fast moving lines" from immediately next to the computer and main dispensing area and arranging a shelf five inches deep and with around four inches clearance between it and the shelf above as a "checking area". Now either the locals get very small sized items round there, or it had escaped the pharmacists' notice that rarely used items e.g. 500ml Lactulose, 500g Aqueous Cream etc, would not fit in this gap. No matter, no contingency plan, no sense, no point. Apparently, soneone at head office said it was they way to do things, so that is how things were to be done. It didn't work, but that was not the point.

For most of the day, nobody could find anything in the drawer system, despite the improvement aimed at making my (the locum's) life easier, it was a nightmare trying to find anything at all. That applied equally to myself as well as the staff who had worked there for some years.

What did concern me most was not that the pharmacists concerned had carried out this wholesale rearrangement of the dispensary oblivious to the concerns of the staff who would have to continue to work with the mess she'd made after she'd gone. That was just plain bad manners and arrogance. No, the worst bit was that during the course of he day I picked out from this recently handled stock over two hundred (yes, 200) different items, all of which were out of date. This pharmacist was supernumary, there had been locums in all of the week, so she had not had to bother getting involved in the day to day work.

Now, if you've taken it upon yourself to move every single pack, bottle or item of stock during the whole of the previous week, yet managed to "overlook" so may out of date items (that ignores items which would become out of date very shortly, since I didn't have the time to be as thorough as I would have wished), what on earth is your checking process for dispensed items like? Don't you check the expiry date when checking, don't you have a date checking rota and/or matrix to assist, don't you simply take the job seriously enough to do some of the basics?

By now, this pharmacist, whom I have never met and do not know, is running a fairly busy pharmacy wihtout any scrutiny other than the RPSGB inspectorate making their routine visits. If she doesn't pay attention to date checking, what else does she not pay attention to? This is surely a fundamental failure of training as well as attitude - do you really need the length of training we now require to understand the importance of expiryr and use before dates on medication? It's not rocket science, after all. But then, there lies the nub of it - if the building blocks are not in place, what happens when the rocket tries to lift off?