I'm a pharmacy tech in the main pharmacy at the largest hospital in my state. We supply most medications to all the clinics, and units in the hospital, as well as several locations in the city.
We have been struggling for months, and it's only gotten worse.
Management is trying something they are calling “optimization”. Their goal is for us to be restocking the med machines in each unit with only the drugs that are actually being used. (We get a LOOOT of expired drugs back that are never touched). While I understand this idea and do agree with that concept, they have been rushing to finish it, which gives us a significant amount of extra work. They also have not been getting OUR input.
Because of how quickly these changes are being made, we are having to start our duties hours later than usual, we are having a hugely increased workload (with the same amount of people to do it, and the same amount of time), people are getting so overwhelmed that they are calling out of work rather than come in and deal with this shit show. Mistakes are being made (there have been 4 emails sent out in the last 2 weeks about different mistakes being made, that could potentially affect patient safety), people are being put on shifts without enough training (we don't have time to properly train people with the amount of extra work being expected of us). And I personally have been working up to 3 positions at once during my weekends, because we don't have the staff.
They had a “meeting” last week that I only happened to be around for. They started these meetings 2 weeks prior, and decided to do them when most of the techs are out on delivery. So, it was all management, plus our pharmacist, and then me and one senior tech. We both brought up that we are getting more work and no extra help, and they responded that they are “working on it”. I asked what they were doing to work on it and they said that want to “look through the data” (how many drugs we are individually packaging, how many drug orders we are filling, how long our deliveries are, etc) to see if it has increased since they started the project.
I then brought up that we have been telling them we have been having a hard time, for MONTHS. I also asked how they were going to collect this data, and they said they didn't know but they were working on it.
So, basically, we are shit out of luck until they decide we need help, and they have no actual process of deciding if we need help.