Quote:
Originally Posted by kb08
Wages for existing pharmacists seem to be holding as it's too demoralizing to cut across the board that way for now. New pharmacist wages are the ones that are being hit first. I believe the wage is sitting somewhere between $32-35/hr at the moment.
The only other thing that pharmacies can do is to maximize earnings while it's still available from whatever clinical services are available and getting that generic money while it's still there. There are SO many factors working against pharmacy at the moment. Even among pharmacists, it is absolutely retarded when I hear that they "don't want to do a medication review for a patient because it's not worth $60 of the government money to do it" without even understanding where the hell this money is coming from. And yet these same pharmacists think they deserve their $38-40/hour. It's absolutely ridiculous and shows how little they understand what's going on in this profession and the landscape of the current economic situation with pharmacy.
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There is a lot of misunderstanding about what pharmacists do and how much/why they get paid what they get paid because there really isn't a physical aspect to it. In the end I think that new prescriptions should costs much more as a dispensing fee whereas the refills should be the current cost. I actually wish community pharmacy was government owned because I also think that the business of healthcare is getting out of hand, but thats an entire other topic.
I work in a hospital and I can tell you on a daily basis I save the hospital 3-4x my wage on a normal day by preventing ADRs or using evidence based medicine. So I think I deserve my wage if not more, we get paged at 2am from doctors asking insanely complex questions over the phone and are expected to aide in patients healthcare. The med reviews done in the community that I have seen are absolutely ridiculous. MOST (not all) community pharmacists are robots and don't understand the medication and how it relates to the patients because the patient only cares about their insurance and therefore that is the only thing people focus on.
Every long term care facility needs a pharmacist so they can manage medications appropriately. The GP with 10,000 patients cannot effective keep these people out of the hospitals and the nurses at these homes are lost because they don't know anything about the medications. They continue to give medications despite obvious side effects or they hold them for some random reason and the patient strokes.
This is a topic I can go on and on about but in the end, 90% of pharmacists don't care enough about healthcare because 99% of patients don't either, they just want pills to fix the problem regardless of the harms or other obvious solutions.
Sorry for the rant....