At least once a week I have patient call in and tell me to “just refill everything”. To which I immediately reply “Well what’s everything? I can’t just guess.” This normally turns into a five minute back and forth that I have a 85% win ratio in which the patient gives in and names a bunch of medications. It also normally turns into the patient asking where the other three medications are when they come in.
Honestly I don’t give a shit about how that impacts our customer service and here’s why.
First off, take some personal responsibility. It is Your health care and medications we are talking about. In a given day we interact with a couple hundred different people so you’ll have to excuse us for not being able to remember exactly what you are taking. Again it’s your health care. We are there to educate you on the medications and make sure everything is done within safe and normal prescribing guidelines.
The primary reason I refuse to “just fill everything” is because things change. Unless you tell me that you discontinued or changed your blood pressure medication its going to get filled and possibly both strengths which you may or may not be on. Assuming I did I now wasted time and effort filling something that is not needed. If there is a major conflict among the medications we will check with the doctor to see what is going on and most likely get a confused response from the office because a week after you picked up the medication last something was changed with the therapy.
In the past I had “just filled everything”, but quickly learned how much of a headache it would turn out to be. By looking a patients profile and filling patterns you can pretty much guess what needs to be filled, but when we are talking about more than five medications things tend to get a little hairy. Again, this where any unknown change throws a wrench in the works. I have also tried to go through a patients profile with them, but it also normally turns into the patient getting mad and telling me once again to just fill everything.
Healthcare is a team effort. The patient is the team captain. The team is going to look to the captain for direction. If all we get is a “do whatever” response the best outcome one can hope for is nothing is done. At worst everything turns into a total cluster fuck.
Rants from an Angry Canadian 