I don’t rant much but I’ve been regularly using my local chemists for just over 2 years now, basically since my heart attack, I’d hardly gone in a chemist for 47 years and now I’m a regular!
The thing is, and I say this as an ex-member of the Institute of Logistics and a person who has been through huge changes to Factories, changing them from old methods to the Japanese “Just in Time” (JIT) methods using KanBan (Japanese for order cards) techniques. It changes supply of components to satisfy demand on it’s head and makes everyone’s life who is in the supply chain, from Original Equipment Manufacturer through to end user, much easier.
Back to the issue with the Chemist……. They have my prescription from the doctor, it’s fairly easy, I have to take 4 different tablets every day for the rest of my life, really not difficult to calculate, I collect my tablets about every two months and so I should get 60 of each, in general.
However, the madness that I have to endure is such that, some of the tablets are packed in tens, some in sevens, some in fourteens and some in twenty eights. Clearly indicating that the chemists, and I mean the industry in general, not just my local crowd, have absolutely no control over their suppliers. It doesn’t sound too bad and can be easily overcome but sometimes, the chemist, probably highly paid, opens a box of 28 tablets, cuts, with scisors, 2 off the packet of 28 and places them in another box that they’ve just had to open to make sure that they give me 30 tablets, to add delay to massive inefficiencies, they then proceed to get a pen and change the packet quntity to 30 on mhy packet and 26 on the packet they keep.
To add to this lunacy, bearing in mind they’ve just given me 60 days worth of tablets, they then require me to go in, between two weeks and one week before I run out and order more???? Why oh why don’t they know when I’m going to run out and have it ready for me. Have you any idea what that would save the system in man hours? I walk in and take up the assistant’s time ordering my next batch, they then send a delivery person to my doctors practice, the receptionist takes it at the appropriate moment in to the doctors office an he has to sign it again, even though he was the person that prescribed it for me in the first place, he then gives it back to the receptionist who keep sit until the delivery guy comes again, he takes it back to the chemists who then put together my order, then I have to go to the chemist and take up the assistant’s time for a second time to collect the order!
If the indow of between two weeks and one week of me running out is cut short then I am then instructed to call the doctors surgery to tell them that it’s urgent. But they all know how many I’ve had and when I’m going to run out!
Are all countries this bad? Imagine if yo ordered a Toyota car and the dealer told you to ring the guy in charge of the purchasing department in the factory in Swindon to tell him to order some parts?
I’ll leave you with that thought.