I once had a prescription filled at Eckerd for two powerful anti-virals. The receipt and price quote the pharmacy handed had the words "POSSIBLE OVERDOSE INDICATED" because the pharmacist couldn't read the doctor's prescription and filled it incorrectly. They were going to give me 10x the recommended dose, until I pointed it out to them.

As a caring retail pharmacist, I resent such a one-sided story. In defense of our industry, when it is reported that "despite techonogical advances" pharmacy error rates have not changed. They do not however even mention the million more prescriptions that are filled in any day now compared to then. I agree that any error is too many but the article is not showing all that has taken place in this time frame. As for reporting errors, where I work and at all the retail pharmacies that I know of, there is a stringent program for reporting errors. In fact, there are serious ramefecations if you do NOT report an error. But 20/20 didn't divulge that or even ask anyone. All pharmacy technicians in this state are required to be "nationally board certified" They undergo formal education and then must pass a national exam. Most states I know of are this way or are heading towards this standard. The practice of hiring untrained highschool students is unheard of. I am particularly irritated with the statement "that very few customers buying aspirin were warmed of potential side affects if taking warfarin". By law, no one but a phamacist may give medication advise. That means, no clerk, pharmacy tech or assistant may give you ANY advise about any medication use, period. If you think we have little time to counsel now, how about we go to the counter everytime someone buys aspirin to inquire if they are taking warfarin? That would be great. What about the millions of aspirin that are sold where there is no pharmacist? I just think the example is far-fetched. As for counselling less, the chain I work for is always striving to allow MORE time for us to counsel. Again I refer to HUGE and ever-growing increase in prescriptions and much more complex medication regimens. Pharmacists have a rigorous and lengthy education to accomplish. Most schools only graduate 90 or so new pharmacist a year. Considering that a pharmacist has many choices as to what venue to practice in. Will it be retail, hospital, the DEA, the FDA, the CIA, any of the pharmaceutical companies,HMO's, the list is HUGE. Retail get a small slice of the pie. Also here's something to consider, Do you have any idea how much of the public comes to us for advise INSTEAD of making a doctors appointment? We spend a lot of time with the public helping them to figure out what is needed. Does the situation require a doctor or can I help and lend a sympathetic ear? Unlike doctors, we do NOT receive any extra monetary compensation for this service. It is FREE .........for now. For me, my job is ALL about making someone's day or life better. My job IS stressful and there is a lot of distraction but I would choose no other career.

Pharmacy errors are a reality, but the report had alot of misinformation and spin. The State Boards of Pharmacy have statistics on medication errors reported to them. If you feel that the pharmacy you get your medication filled made a mistake or is doing something illegal, please report it immediately to your State Board of Pharmacy. A pharmacist should always be present while a pharmacy is open and is soley responsible for any medication that leaves the pharmacy. The pharmacist does the final check and should always counsel new prescriptions in compliance with most state regulations.

I am a liscensed pharmacy intern and I have been working in a retail pharmacy for six years. I did work behind the counter when I was sixteen years old and I had no problem handling the job whatsoever. Even if I did make a mistake, the pharmacist was there to catch it. There was never a time where I filled a prescription and it went out to the patient without the pharmacist checking it. That was a very misleading part of the "report" aired on 20/20. You made it seem like untrained high school aged technicians were filling prescriptions without supervision. I also did not like the fact that the one pharmacist was blaming the company for urging him to fill faster. Much of that demand is customer driven. Customers will complain if they have to wait more than five minutes to get their medication. They think that all we are doing is taking pills from a big bottle and putting them in a little bottle. Then when an error happens, it is suddenly a more complex job and people should be taking more time to make sure everything is correct. It seems as if pharmacists cannot win. The time issue is the reason why there are so many more technicians working than pharmacists. There is generally only one pharmacist working at a time, and the rest are technicians or interns. That is what makes the aspirin example so weak. From looking at the video, it appeared that it was only technicians that rang up the product with the warfarin without saying anything. It was also unfair to say that the "patients" in the example left without having any knowledge of the aspirin/warfarin interaction. The bottle of warfarin probably had an auxillary label on it that said "Do not take with aspirin or aspirin containing products." The patient also has to have some responsibility to know what they are signing. It says right there on the paper what exactly they are signing for. The tape did not show if the technician asked if the patient had any questions. If the patient responds "no", then that is a refusal to counsel. The last part of the "investigation" that troubled me was that 20/20 basically received 100 fake prescriptions. Who wrote those prescriptions, and who were they for? Is that legal or ethical? If you're going to go that far to show some kind of problem with the industry, why don't you also spend a day in a pharmacy and count the number of times the pharmacist saves somebody's life? If you did a study on that, there would be an exponential examples of that over even the smallest filling error.

I would like to respond to your pharmacy error report. While mistakes are made in every profession, health care providers do everything in their power to prevent this. I think if you dug a little deeper, you would find out that the reason pharmacies rely on technicians to do the bulk of the processing work is because insurance reimbursement for prescriptions is ridicuously low.There is no way that any pharmacy, chain or otherwise could afford to have multiple pharmacists on a shift to process the prescriptions. The insurance industry and government programs have slashed reimbusement levels to bare minimums. This is where the blame lies, not on business owners and/or pharmacists who do their best and always have the best interest of the patients at heart.

This is concerning your “Undercover Pharmacy Investigation”.

While I am not defending prescription errors and the actions of some pharmacies having teenagers dispense medications, I would like to make some positive comments about Walgreens and other observations.

My wife and I both have long term health problems. We have received excellent service from our local Walgreens. They have gone out of their way to assist us and some of the pharmacists have even made the effort to remember our names.

One of the reasons I changed from an HMO to an insurance company accepted by Walgreens and others, is because the “in house” pharmacy of the HMO dispensed the wrong medication to my wife. This was not one of the “country's best known chain drug stores.” We caught the blunder before my wife took the medication.

The final responsibility for ensuring a person takes the correct medication lies with that person or a care giver. People should read the label and the information that comes with the medication. I don’t know if you made this point during your program but if you did not, then you did a disservice to your viewers. Doctors could help in this area by writing prescriptions so that patients can read them.

On two separate occasions, the shape and color of two of my medications changed. Both times I immediately checked and found that it was the same medications, only by different manufacturers. I have called the pharmacy more than once with questions on medication compatibility and the pharmacists have been very patient and helpful.

While all pharmacies have room to improve, too many people are too quick to shirk personal responsibility. Read the label folks, it is your life or health, or that of a loved one.

I am a lisensed pharmacist who worked in retail for several years. I finally left and now work in a hospital. The reason I left is because the general public assumes alot of false information about the role of a pharmacist. The 20/20 new brief did just that. There are 4 major reasons for medication error. First, the general public does not understand that a pharmacist is busily trying to check your prescription for correct dosage, interactions, make sure its appropriate for a certain age population so forth. The general public still insists on interupting a busy pharmacist to ask where the toothpaste is. Or they come to the pharmacy counter to have their toothpast rung up even if they are not filling a prescription. This is unsafe and distracting to a pharmacist. Second the general public does not understand that a PHARMACIST or even the pharmacy does not decide how much you must pay for your prescription. The patients INSURANCE COMPANY does. It is surprising how many times a patient complains about that to the pharmacist and wastes their time when they can not do anything about it. In fact if you did an investigation you will probably find that 90% of the time when a person actually says "Yes" to the question "do you have any questions for the pharmacist" it is about their insurance, not the medication itself. This misunderstanding is again a real distraction. Third the general public likes to treat a pharmacy like a fast food restaurant. They are really upset when they are told they will have to wait even 20 minutes for a prescription. In all honestly having to only wait 20 minutes for a prescription when there are probably at least 2 dozen in front of you is not safe, however that is what is asked of a chain pharmacist. Forth, chain drug stores add to these problems by insisting that customer service be the most important. When dealing with someones life I do not think it is right for the chain store to expect someone to drop what they are doing and run to the counter to ring a patient out, or run to the drive up as if you work at Burger King.

There would be fewer errors if medical records and communication between different sectors of medicine were more open. We can hope for technologic improvements or to hold more pharmacists more accountable, but that will just avoid a more global solution. Why do insurance companies have detailed information of all prescriptions filled by a patient, but withhold this information from pharmacists. In the story above where Pam is wise enough to double check doses between the hospital and community pharmacy records- why did the pharmacy have no access to those same records?
We can continue to point the finger at the pharmacy, but improvements in error prevention will only come when attention is placed on the entire system, versus just one player.

As a pharmach technician for walgreens pharmacy. I cannot beleive that a show like 2020 would only investigate one side of this matter. No one knows what we go through to insure that patients get the correct medication. Most times they are at the counter yellin at us to fill their prescriptions faster and rushing us and all we are trying to do is get them right. there is alot of work involved and you can either have it right or fast. at my pharmacy we do over 800 prescriptions a day 7 days a week out of those we might only let 1 get by wrong in any given week. we have very caring pharmacy staff who would go through almost anything for the safety of their patients, calling dr's to verify strengths and directions 5 or 6 times while still trying to counsel and fill rx's. what we go through is incredible. you should go behind the scenes in a pharmacy and look at the other side of this matter. Also what about the dr's errors, at least half of the errors in the pharmacy is because the dr wroth the wrong strength or directions. Dr's handwrightings are another issue, i applaud the dr's who print all of their prescriptions on the computer we can read those and their is no confusion as to what it is. dont get me wrong i am not saying mistakes are never made, but the leaps and bounds we go through to help people and make sure their prescriptions are done correctly is incredible. i have been a faithful 2020 viewer for over a year now and i am sick the way you pertrayed the retail pharmacy business. we are in it to help people and the people should know our side of the story also. that is all i have to say about the matter thank you

Do you realize the increase in cost the consumer would have to pay if we had a pharmacist counsel every patient who buys asprin. The patient complaines constantly because it takes more than 5 minutes to fill their rx, and because it too expensive, we handle insurance problems, dr calls, patient problems, checking out customers, people buzzing us in drive through, typing, filling, checking, double checking, double counting, and checking every single think we do for error. we care deeply about the patient. I am seriously ticked about this report and you are scaring people into not filling their vital medication because of fear that we may make a mistake. I had a woman call and counsel all of her medication today because she didnt want to have a potentally deadly mistake made. It took me over 30 minutes to convince her that she needed her synthroid and antibiotics. I hope you all are happy. You may have just killed more people than all the mistakes we have make that caused deaths in the past 5 years.

I am a pharmacist for walgreens and have worked for two other major pharmacy chains s in my 15 years as a pharmacist walgreens as a company does more than any other chain I've worked for to assure pharmacists have sufficient , trained technicians to help with their work and a pharmacist always checks the final prescription if it is a new prescription all customers are offered a pharmacist consultation mistakes do happen but walgreens and most pharmacies do everyhting they can to prevent errors and report them and institute preventative measures wherever possible. Also as one of my colleagues noted people can always check with their local board of pharmacy to check on errors by a specific pharmacist or pharmacy. As professionals we take responsibility for our actions but people need to acknowledge the difficulties of filling prescriptions give pharmacists the time they need to fill prescriptions and read the labels and directions and call their pharmacy with any questions, Doctors should also write legibly or use computers or electronic prescribing to help prevent errors. If we all work together seriuos errors can be averted. laying all the blame on one pharmacy chain o r pharmacies in general is irresponsible and incorrect.-

I would like the producers of 20/20 to come into a pharmacy and show the country what it is that we do every day. As a certified pharmacy tech working in a retail chain I feel almost unappreciated, people just don't understand the things that we deal with on a daily basis. We do not just have to "slap a lable on it" like most people think. We check first to see if the patient has had the meds before, if they are allergic to anything and if the dosing is correct, half the time we need to call the doctors office because either something is incorrect or we can't read the script. Now the patient needs to wait longer. I really wish we could bring cameras into the pharmacy and show people what really goes into filling prescriptions, I think it would open alot of eyes.

I would like to point out the 1 sidedness of this story. I am a certified technician and I work in a retail pharmacy. The pharmacy that I work in fills at least 3000 scripts in a week. Pharmacist work up to 12 hour days. I understand mistakes shouldn't happen, but everyone makes mistakes. I see alot of doctors making errors in prescribing, dosing etc. And I take great offense to the fact that technicians are to blame. I agree that a pharmacy is no place for a teenager to work, unless they intend on persueing a career in pharmacy. But as a technician I can assure you, I know my role and responsibility. And no matter what the final product comes from the pharmacist. We may put it all together but it goes through a rigourous examination before leaving our pharmacy, via the pharmacist. So I don't appreciate the negative light spread onto technicians. And I can't speak for all pharmacies, but we have some very thorough pharmacist in our district. It is extremely judgemental to lump together all pharmacies and its employees. Trust me it's not an easy job, dealing with sick, elderly and down right cranky people everyday. Maybe you should have investigated other aspects of what goes on in a daily pharmacy setting before going out and bashing hard working and intelligent people. A mistake made by one pharmacy or pharmacist, is not a reason to degrade all pharmacies. It's a tough profession with alot of training and hands on experience. Which clearly now everyone will see, that pharmacist are idiots and just question them more on their judgements and recommendations. So thank you for making my job that much harder.

What about the training of X-Ray techs and other "skilled" medical positions? They take warm bodies off the street just like pharmacies do.

I'm a technician at Walgreens and a fan of 20/20 and ABC. I'm very dissappointed at ABC, specifically at 20/20 for Friday night's episode. The program's single sided and narrow view of the situation. Your report was so influenced by our competitor CVS/Sav-ons, whom associated with your station. Dispensing medication is a big responsibility. A mistake can be fatal. On that point, big chains pharmacies, such as Walgreens have protocols and policies to eliminate mistakes. FYI, Walgreens technicians, as I AM, are required to be licensed by State Board of Pharmacy and Walgreens strongly recommend us to be Nationally licensed(by the PTCB -you might want to check them out at ptcb.org ). Which I Am. Both licenses are required to be renewed every two years and the national license required 20 units are hours of continue education every two years, before they issue the renewal. I'm not here to say we don't make mistake but I'm here to say how you smear the thousands of great individuals who take great care of people medication needs every day. The technicians and pharmacist I've worked with, at Walgreens, are great individuals whom take great care and cautious in dispensing medication. They understand how important it is to get it right. Another FYI, CVS/Sav-ons have their patient signed when they pick up medication has a hidden purpose. Their staff don't tell you that when you signed you're declining to be consulted. You thought you're signing to provide them proof of the pick up of your medication. There only a fine print indicating you're declining by signing. I know this because a colleague of mine, at Walgreens used to work at CVS/Sav-ons. ABC gives me a negative feeling about the station just like you've gave negative feelings to many people about Walgreens and the pharmacy professions. I have such high regards for ABC but after this I don't have such regards but now have great many doubts about your station.

I am a Nationally Certified Pharmacy Technician. I am not a high school student or just someone off the street. The company I work for is a great company. I had to go through a lot of training to get my pharmacy tech licenses. I had to study hard and I have to keep up my license with continuing education every two years. I think your report gives us CPht a bad rap. In my store also we don't wear white. I never answer a question about a medication I always go and get our Pharmacist in charge, as I was told to do. I think this report is one sided, and very political. I think that you should talk to all of the people that we help day in a day out. And also if people would realize that if they need to get a Rx filled that it is more than just putting pills in a bottle. No matter where you go there is always some wait. You have to wait in a doctors office, you have to wait for you medication also. I think that is the main problem is that people have no patience anymore. I don't think that it is fair for these people in the report to have to be marked with a scarlett letter the rest of their lives. My heart goes out to the families of those in the story who were affected by those mistakes. We are only human. I have the most respect for the Pharmacist I work with. I would trust them with my medication and my families. They are dedicated, and help everyone that needs their help. They also make sure to give out of the drug reactions and precautions. I think ABC needs to think about the other side.

I absolutely agree that it is shocking that there are no records of pharmacy errors. Until there are records, it is imperative that the patients read the inserts that come with their medicines. Fortunately, Walgreens and CVS include a picture and color/markings with a detailed description of the medication. Patients can be more assured that the medication dispensed is correct by comparing it to the picture. Also, patients should write down what their doctors prescribe so when they pick up their prescriptions, they can make sure that they have received the correct medicine and dosage. It is more work for the patient, but it is worth it. After all, it is your health!

One thing to remember is that some states do have stricter requirements for technicians. I teach a pharmacy technician training program in California. In this state it is required that an individual obtain a state license, by completing a training program, or passing the National PTCB exam. In addition they must be 18 years of age, a high school graduate/GED and have a background check.

Another important point is that Pharmacy Technicians are one step in the fill process, and only one set of eyes responsible for preventing medication errors. The fact of the matter is that pharmacists are the more highly trained individual, and are ultimately responsible for checking each and every medication leaving the pharmacy.
As a teacher for the profession I continually emphasize accuracy, and and patient care. I agree with the above poster. A negative light has been shed on the entire profession.
In all areas of medicine errors are made, because of human error, there is no perfection. However, the effort and training that goes into error prevention is extensive.
Your story is not so much an expose, as pharmacies have always made errors to some extent.
Instead of casting a negative light on an entire industry, you should instead educate patients on how they can be more aware of what medications they are taking and why. Patient education is the final step in the process of preventing medication errors. A patient should always question their doctor regarding their prescriptions and find out what the name, strength and directions should be for the medication they will be taking.

I am a certified hospital IV/Pharmacy technician and a nursing major. Age has no bearing on one's capability to be thorough and efficient. I see plenty of older technicians/pharmacists who do a much poorer job than a 16 or 17 year old. They become so comfortable in their experience and environment that they haphazardly throw these things together and do not check their work.

And as a side note, the work of technicians is ALWAYS checked by the pharmacist before ANYTHING goes out. It is their license and expertise at stake. The reason they went to school for 6 years was precisely to be able to catch any errors made before the med goes out. Perhaps if customers were not screaming at technicians, cashiers, and pharmacists because they have to wait 15 minutes, everyone may be able to do their job a little better. I doubt in your workplace that you are expected to be at 100% productivity while people berate and yell at you.

P.S. I was a 17 year old technician at CVS. Never made a mistake.

Hi,
I am a pharmacy Technician been one for 20 years. Yes I did work retail for a short time. But what I did not like was the ability not to have a lunch unable to sit or go to the bathroom. Because when your store was busy you could not do those things. Also most of the chain stores let unqualified technicians work in their stores. Just like your program states. Yeah there's training but guess what if they want to be trained. If you do not take the training you can still work in the pharmacy. We have complained about this for years about retail because they refuse to pay a technician who is highly skilled and qualified to work in the pharmacy the money she/he wants to earn. That is why their are some many teenagers in the pharmacy. Please feel free to contact me for more info