My epic mirrors that of Tony (How Boots went rogue,The long read, 13 April). I have been broken by Boots despite being faithful. I too have had overwhelming pressure to perform services for pure profit over patient benefit. I was set targets by my manager at times expecting 30 Medicines exhaust Reviews (MURs) a week. My manager showed total disregard for ethics, or saying: “I dont care how you enact them but I want them done.” For a period in this store I refused to enact services as I felt patient safety issues in store needed to be addressed first or a patient would come to harm. These concerns were on more than one occasion dismissed and I was threatened that if I didn’t enact the services I would face disciplinary action. The manager on a daily basis would assign me to the walk-in counter in an extremely busy store with trainee staff producing a tall error rate. Scripts were never ready and done on a walk-in basis despite them being in store for up to a week. Towards the end of my time in that store I had no dispenser and was facing queues and complaints on my own despite asking for help and was self-checking. The pressure was extreme and bad practices led me to steal time off for stress.
My health and confidence have been affected and in my experience Boots has establish MURs and NMS before basic patient care. Self-checking is expected and relied upon considerably and the common practice in most stores open on a Sunday is for a pharmacist to work without a dispenser.
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Source: theguardian.com