Jeez, I'm out of practice. Granted, it's been awhile since I took 10+ days vacation, but after being back a few days my knees are screaming, my eyeballs are throbbing and I am totally wiped. I did a lot of walking on the trip, but apparently that means the body is now unaccustomed to just standing all day and staring at computer screens and assorted pieces of paper. I gotta get back into fightin' pharmacist form -- this is ridiculous.
In pre-pharmacy (and I'm sure pre-med, pre-dental, pre-podiatry, etc.) we all have to take stuff like calculus -- get through it, and never think of it again. I couldn't solve a differential equation now to save my life, but I think simple addition and subtraction is perhaps a skill they should emphasize more. We had one course in pharmacy school where we were allowed no calculators -- we had to solve those pharmacy 'math' problems the old-fashioned way, and BOY did people struggle with that course. Even if they knew how to solve the problem they would always make some dumb math error (and there was no partial credit). I bring this up because one of our narcotic counts was way off the other day. Still trying to get my mojo back, I stared at the log, re-counted tablets and rifled through old prescriptions before realizing that someone had received a new bottle of 100 tablets, added it to the 230 already in stock, and come up with a new balance of 490. Sigh. There's 20 minutes I'll never get back.....hopefully I'll get the groove back this week.
3 comments:
I have to deal with that SO often it makes me cringe!! I feel your pain!
Yeah, I can't count the number of times I have tried to figure out why a count was wrong only to realize someone simply didn't add or subtract when they filled a script or added stock that came in on an order. It is frustrating but it is better than actually having pills missing!
I teach Calculations and Compounding. I have students who reach for a calculator to figure out their 5% margin of error on a 30 g prescription. Especially frustrating is when they are allowed to use a calculator and still make errors - transposing digits, wayward decimal points, misremembered conversion factors, and so forth. <headdesk>
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