Thread by @thepharmabrewer

Ok #twitteRX I think it’s time for another thread. After the public very public spat with an RPh in academia, now is a good time to talk about the role of academia and professional organizations in retail pharmacy. 1/

I’ll start by saying that most people in academia and the professional organizations have the best intentions and are likely highly accomplished and talented pharmacists and techs.

With that being said, they are not accomplishing much for us in retail. 2/

Sure they’ve tried to do a lot to expand the role of a pharmacist from immunization to MTM to pushing for provider status to prescribing roles in certain situations. And that’s great but they do little to make sure that we’re given the proper resources to do them. 3/

With every expansion of the pharmacist’s role, chain retail pharmacies see an opportunity for a new revenue source. And to maximize profits, they try to make it ‘payroll neutral’. Translation: do more with the same resources and pay. 4/

Where are professional organizations on that? Or the pharmacy schools? They sit that fight out. They’ve set us up to fail, surely not intentionally but ultimately they have by not fighting for us to have the proper resources to them right. 5/

MTM is a great example. I was huge advocate of it in school and early in my career but now it’s just another metric. They don’t care about the outcomes, just that they get done so that they might get better reimbursements. 6/

A big reason why MTM became this is because the reimbursements are poor and aren’t enough to justify the staffing, so it just gets added the regular staff’s workload and we get like in-line CMRs. 7/

The consistent theme here is that they advocate for things that sound great but don’t fight to get us the resources we need to do them.

It’s like if a hospital got approval for a new wing but no money to build it and the maintenance staff are expected to build it themselves. 8/

The professional orgs should be leading the fight for better working conditions instead a few RPhs on social media but they’re not. They should be at every BOP meeting fighting for us, but they’re not. They should be fighting PBMs, but they’re not. 9/

These problems aren’t new. They’ve sat back and watched as independent pharmacies have died out and PBMs have taken over. Chain pharmacies continue to expect more out of us with fewer resources. Why? Because no one is stopping them. 10/

And why would anyone stop them? BOPs are led by people who work for the chains. Professional organizations and pharmacy schools also are significantly funded by chains along with insurance companies, PBMs and drug manufacturers. 11/

The phrase ‘follow the money’ is very important here. It helps you understand why work conditions are the way they are and the groups who should be doing something about it, aren’t. 12/

Our friend’s biggest sin was that he said the quiet parts out loud. He doesn’t think there’s a problem, just unmotivated people complaining. And he wants them to quiet down because it might hurt enrollment at his school. 13/

Maybe he knows that conditions are bad or maybe he’s just clueless. Either way, I don’t think he cares. He just wants us to stop scaring people away from the profession. An objective he shares with the chains pushing the staffing shortage articles. 14/

One thing that’s for sure, we shouldn’t stop speaking out about the pharmacy working conditions. It’s unfortunate that leading people away from pharmacy is needed but it is.

When they try to silence your voice, that’s when you know you’re getting somewhere. #twitteRX 15/15