I think this is just a trend everywhere but I’ve been very frustrated this week by how much admin work is being outsourced to me as the patient/customer.
My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn’t come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.
The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they’re not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.
I feel like at a certain point these constant fetch quests become unreasonable?? Is it too much to expect these groups to communicate with each other instead of making me run back and forth between them???
Made this post and then the new property manager (who started on Monday and only finally emailed us today because I sent a vaguely professionally hostile email to her boss because I hadn’t heard anything and was not convinced she existed) asked for a list of open action items which her predecessor should have had but apparently wasn’t keeping track of, which I learned when I met her boss and provided her with the list of open action items, which I guess tragically died in a fire in the last 2 weeks since she was sitting at my kitchen table, being menaced by the skull. How many people’s jobs am I doing now
omg I have some complicated feelings about this.
so there’s one comment in the notes about how “lazy” employees would refuse to send an email for customer convenience even though it would take “just 2 seconds” to send. Which… yeah, valid complaint
but it’s more than just “laziness” on the part of employees (although there definitely are a lot of employees who have lost all empathy for what customers and patients are actually going through, and that’s its own whole problem, and it’s frustrating as hell for those employees who still do care).
It’s also a systemic “laziness” on the part of corporations: a refusal to put certain things in their own employees’ job descriptions and to allot enough staffing to do those things.
yes, at my pharmacy job it could take 2 seconds to send an email, IF there was an established template for emails and an easily accessible button to select, customize and send it for the patient who currently needs it. But if it isn’t so seamlessly integrated into our job, it will require composing the email from scratch on our own.
Which still isn’t a LOT of time and work… but, suppose it takes 1 minute. Then multiply by, say, 30 customers who need it done per day per employee (in a busy pharmacy day shift). That’s 30 extra minutes of work for the employee who gets those 30 calls. Who, in many cases, is already assigned more work than physically possible to complete in a day, even skipping all breaks, and will be penalized for taking any overtime. If this extra email-sending is not explicitly a required part of the employee’s job description, an already overworked employee is not likely to try and make time to do it.
Now, I’m the kind of employee who still does this sort of thing for patients who ask. And I did this even at my worst and most overworked jobs. Where it was thankless work, each individual case more likely to get me yelled at than praised by management (although, once I’d established it as an expectation customers had, I’d then also get yelled at for not doing it, by both customers and management, once the managers got the customer complaints). No-win situation for everyone.
Another source of frustration for the busier pharmacies I’ve worked in: The responsibility of calling for prescription transfers. Everyplace I’ve worked has had basically the same rule: If a patient wants to get a med transferred from one pharmacy to another, calling for it is the responsibility of the pharmacy that is to receive the prescription.
I think the reason is partly corporate self-interest (“no pharmacy takes on the extra work of making calls to give away their own customers to another pharmacy. The pharmacy getting the new business has to work for it.”) But it’s also probably an issue of responsibility for error– if I call another pharmacy to transfer out a prescription because a patient told me to, I’m at fault if I’ve been given the wrong contact information and end up transferring it to the wrong pharmacy.
Or, if the patient hasn’t even looked into whether the other pharmacy even CAN fill this prescription, they just think it’d be more convenient– then, if I call the other pharmacy to transfer, they are likely to assume I know what I’m doing (especially if I get an entry-level, barely trained employee, as is often the case). They’ll accept my word that they should be able to fill it. And then, if it ends up being something they don’t sell, or an insurance they don’t accept, THEN we’ve got the prescription stuck at a pharmacy that can’t do anything with it, and it’ll be another whole mess to get it back, and then it’s my fault for not just leaving the work to the pharmacy that’s invested in getting the new Rx.
In practice, though, the way it’s done is ALSO an absolute mess.
At my busier former workplaces, it would go like this:
I pick up the phone. It’s one of our current patients, calling to say they need their prescription transferred to another pharmacy. I tell them that they will have to call the other pharmacy to call us. They fight back, pointing out that this is extra work for everyone (because at that point, me calling the other pharmacy would be just one more call, whereas them calling the other pharmacy and having them call me would be two more calls.) I agree but reiterate that it’s our policy. The patient hangs up. Then later– assuming that those two calls out of my control actually went through– our pharmacy will hear from the other one, and we’ll start the transfer process.
BUT I’d better have made sure I added a clear note on the patient’s profile about their earlier call, AND that my coworkers actually bother to look at the profile notes. Because, turns out that call wasn’t just wasted time on the patient’s part– even though the patient may now think it was.
Because, if we don’t have any record of the patient’s earlier call, then whichever of my coworkers received the new call is now just getting a random out-of-nowhere call from another pharmacy asking us to give them one of our customers! And there’ve been issues with pharmacies that have done that without even having the patient’s permission. SO we’ve got to call back again to confirm with the patient that they actually want this. It’s the most excruciating game of phone tag and everyone involved totally hates it.
And this is before I even get into the subject of calls that involve doctors’ offices or fucking insurance companies.
Which… no, I’m not going to get into that now. (crashes in exhaustion)