Bad Pharmacist

It looked a little odd. It was written on the prescription blank as a transfer in to our pharmacy, but it only said from CVS in a town on the other side of the state. No prescription number. No pharmacy phone number. Prescription was for Stadol NS. Plus, it was for the other pharmacist's husband. Hmmmm.

I photocopied the prescription and placed it into a file. I might need to keep this for later, I thought.

Two weeks later I was reviewing the previous weekend's prescriptions (we were a slow pharmacy so we were able to do all of the QA stuff that corporate wanted). There was one of our refill authorization forms with an "OK x 1 by MD" written on the face of the form. I did a little checking. The prescription was processed at 2:15 on Saturday afternoon. So I called the doctor's office. They had released both my partner and her husband as patients over 12 months prior. I spoke directly with the physician and he stated that he did not authorize the medication over the weekend.

From there it took one phone call to the pharmacy board and 5 days later, my partner had her license suspended. The BoP had been investigating this pharmacist when she worked on the other side of the state, but she moved before they could make a case against her. Since our inspector's have such a gigantic caseload, her file did not get forwarded to our local BoP agent.

And my employer did not do a background check on this pharmacist. They hired her simply because she was breathing and had a license. I had known her back in college, but she fell behind after our first or second year so I lost track of her. Never would have suspected her of stealing medications or forging prescriptions.

She has since completed a rehab program and had her license reinstated.

The best part..... when the BoP agent came to the pharmacy to bust her, our DM was requested to be present. And he was hauling around one of the corporate VPs that day. She had to sit in the store's dingy office for two hours while the bust went down. HA!