WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON "OFF HOURS" CALL?

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones." (Proverbs 17:22)

I've written a couple of other times about things I've learned on my job as a telephone answering service operator that I never knew before. I've been surprised at what the most common issue is on calls we get "off hours"- that is, on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, and evenings - times when most of the regular doctors' offices are closed. Some of my fellow operators may disagree with me, but I'd say the most common call is, "My prescription is not at the pharmacy"; often it's, "My child's prescription is not at the pharmacy". If I had a $5 bill for every time I got one of those calls, I'd have a LOT of money. I never would have dreamed how COMMON this problem is.

The thing I get a chuckle out of are the callers who call regarding this issue who sound shocked and very upset; as though they are the one person in a MILLION whose prescription was actually NOT at the pharmacy as they expected. In fact, it's SUCH a common problem, I'd say it's EPIDEMIC! I'm no inventor, and I'm not at all "technical". If I were, I'd try to figure out a way to minimize this problem. Listen, if some inventor DOES figure that out, he or she will become a multi-millionaire.

You'd think with the fact that the overwhelming number of prescriptions are FAXed to pharmacies or phoned to them (rather than the old fashioned way of the doctor writing a prescription out that no one can read) that things would have gotten much better, but that's not at all the case. (Now, some doctors still DO hand write out their prescriptions, but very few still do that.) Matters can get really dicey and somewhat comical when pharmacies and doctors get into kind of a war of trying to blame each other about why the prescription was not there. I can't name any names, but there's one particularly nice male doctor we answer for. One of my coworkers called him to inform him a patient had phoned to say he never called in the prescription to the pharmacy. My coworker was shocked that the doctor let some choice language fly about that! Pharmacies say the prescription was never received, and doctors insist they sent it. But, alas, many seem to end up in "never never land". And, many times the prescription COMES but its details are WRONG in one way or another. I take two prescription meds, myself, and I've had that experience.

One of my own doctors told me that pharmacies messing up the prescriptions is amazingly common. Well, he was a doctor, so he blames the pharmacies. But it goes the other way, too.

Now, it's actually GOOD for our answering service. For, the more prescriptions that are not at the pharmacies and the more prescriptions that are incorrect, well, the more calls and messages we take, and that's good for us! But, it really isn't good for medical care. I wonder why this problem is SO common and what can be done to fix it?!