Giving Techs a Bad Name
August 25, 2008
An article by Marshall Allen, titled “For pharmacy techs, drugs easy to steal. Low-paid workers have easy access to pills and little cause to fear prosecution”
The article paints a picture of a low-paid worker with no education stuffing their pockets full of Vicodin to make a quick buck.
It makes no mention of the thousands of hard-working, dedicated, and CERTIFIED techs who care about their career and the health of their patients. Techs who do it on a nearly poverty-level income because they care about their job. I take my career very seriously. And I am angry and ashamed when I see these reports on the few bad apples, instead of spotlighting the many great ones.
I suggest Mr. Allen, as the Medical Affairs Reporter for the paper, look deeper into what the Pharmacy Technician really does. Not just the ones who steal or commit a severe dispensing error.
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I have written a letter to mr. allen of the LV sun and hope it will be published as all of us hardworking, honest technicians deserve to have our voices heard. I was also understandably upset upon reading this article which I find to be, in my honest opinion, crap! We shall see if my letter gets published in an upcoming edition of the Sun.
I agree with the above comment. My goal is to one day develop a system that would register any tech that has stolen pills or drugs from work, to become unable to get a pharmacy job nationwide… I would think it would deter people from getting the urge to steal from the pharmacy considering half of the people that did do it had no intentions of doing it but they did it because there was nothing to loose and its easy for them. Although it is an epidemic on the rise, the problem of pharmacy diversion lies with more than techs, its also pharmacists. Pharmacists have nobody that really checks there work, and the average person would never think a pharmacist would even do that. The other new thing is when MD’s and PharmD’s get together and actually have a diversion ring allowing a patient to get whatever he wants without question, or just sending actual prescriptions that are fraudulent and the pharmacist just approving them because he is in on it… Maby i should just be a LP (loss prevention) CPhT haha. The entire issue just makes me sick, and then the media making an article like they did here giving all of us a bad name saying that we are low paid (definately not at the hospital)……