LOS ANGELES (KNX) — There seems to be no job industry that has escaped the effects of the coronavirus pandemic- including the pharmaceutical sector. Like restaurants and businesses, pharmacies have struggled to fill open positions, leaving current staff overwhelmed with the amount of work on their plates, a new survey shows.
“Between rollouts of COVID-19 vaccines for children, boosters and seasonal flu shots – on top of their other existing patient care services – pharmacies are stretched very thin, while patients need them more than ever,” Pharmacist Douglas Hoey said in a statement.
Hoey is the CEO of the National Community Pharmacists Association, which recently surveyed independent pharmacies to determine their stresses as the pandemic continues.
Locally, some pharmacy technicians and staff said the addition of new vaccines and boosters have sometimes been just too much to handle. But there’s nothing they can do but grin and bear it.
“I come home and I cry, I go on my lunch break, I cry,” Deanna Amondsen, told KTLA. Amondsen is a pharmacy technician at a South Bay Walgreens.
“They’ve scheduled us literally an appointment every 10 minutes and every person comes in wanting a different vaccine,” Amondsen said, adding that she worries about accuracy with that kind of workload piled up. “There’s just two of us and we also have to do all the prescriptions at the same time.”
Nationally, the labor shortage has left many pharmacies struggling to fill open roles. Among independent pharmacies, “60% said they are dealing with supply chain disruptions,” according to the NCPA, and “nearly 70% reported struggling to fill staff positions, with the pharmacy technician and clerk/front-end staff slots being the most difficult to hire.”
Unfortunately, there’s no amount of money that can be thrown at the problem, according to Mike Johnston, the CEO and founder of the National Pharmacy Technicians Association.
“We could use more help,” he said in an interview with USA Today. “There’s just not the supply to meet the demand right now.”
In some cases, the lack of new hires has led to several pharmacies falling behind on care, NCPA said in a statement, explaining that there have been longer wait times for patients getting prescriptions and, in some cases, lower numbers of flu shots being administered.
Through Oct. 9, around 11.5 million flu shots had been administered at pharmacies, USA Today reported. The number is 34% down from the 17.4 million administered around the same time last year, according to the Centers For Disease Control.
Unfortunately the issues are affecting independent pharmacies and drugstore chains alike, USA Today reports, and sometimes may lead to walk-in patients being turned away when coming in for flu shots and other vaccines.
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