Pharmacists who work in hospitals in British Columbia will be receiving upwards of a 14% wage cut. Undoubtedly they will be decrying the end of humanity over the next few months but one wonders why they should be immune from the same realities faced by all private sector employees?
It is always the front row people like pharmacists who get wacked. why not look at the human resources ( read equity officers) or the explosion in middle management Do we need wound management officers at 120,00/year?
“but one wonders why they should be immune from the same realities faced by all private sector employees?”
Because they are “public” employees,and hence entitled to their entitlements.
Nick….agreed. We could fire 50-75% of all “public” leeches at the municipal,provincial,and federal levels,and guess what?? I’m willing to bet next years paycheck not ONE private sector employee/employer,retiree,unemployed,vet,Joe/Jane taxpayer,etc would notice ANY change in service.
Remember,regardless of stripe,the government and their employees are your enemy.
Re: ” but one wonders why they should be immune from the same realities faced by all private sector employees?”
Your answer is in the second paragraph of the article:
” … it is cancelling a temporary wage increase it began offering in 2006 in an effort to help recruit people into hard-to-fill positions.“
An experienced and licensed pharmacist I expect would have no trouble finding alternate employment.
Nick, I also agree with what you said. Whatever the industry/sector, I’m convinced that many, many middle-management paper pushers could be fired and no one would notice any difference. Well, in fact there’d be an improvement for the frontline employees because much of their stupid paperwork would no longer be required.
I have a good friend who’s a public school teacher in Vancouver. The amount of non-teaching B.S. he has to take care of every week is mind boggling.
If you were to give me a 30% increase since 2006, and then in 2012 claw back a portion identified as “temporary”, I wouldn’t be happy – but I probably wouldn’t be surprised.
Neither would I be screetching about unfair labour practices and whatnot, but then I’ve always been in the private sector.
Because they are highly educated and possess a skill vital to the wellbeing of others. If you want Joe Schmoe checking to make sure that your mother is on the right medications and that an error hasn’t been made in prescribing them (that could harm or even kill her potentially) feel free.
Don’t complain when it happens, though, and don’t complain when there is a shortage of pharmacists because newly trained ones are leaving en masse for greener pastures.
Now if it was done to politicians & senior bureaucrats, it would mean something.
Than folks could point to real Government.
Not be able to cry about it.
That will never happen. More likely they will use the savings here, to raise their own pay.
Dante,Where are these greener pastures? BC public service workers ARE all working in greener pastures.I was in Ireland and the doctors and lawyers from eastern Europe were bell boys in hotels.That was their greener pastures.
But the free crack pipes and other drugs with free help will carry on, soon to be free alcohol
“Nick….agreed. We could fire 50-75% of all “public” leeches at the municipal,provincial,and federal levels,and guess what?? I’m willing to bet next years paycheck not ONE private sector employee/employer,retiree,unemployed,vet,Joe/Jane taxpayer,etc would notice ANY change in service.”
I once owned a business in a small town.
One day the local postmaster came in to my store to tell me hat the post office might be going on strike.
He didn’t like in when I replied” so how will we know”
Robert, are you stupid or just an asshole? Do you figure that any retard can hand out medication with no chance of anything possibly going wrong? Yet, hospital directors make $400 thousand a year because “you have to pay to get the best”, even though they do not make decisions that can be potentially fatal.
Maybe someone could help me here. I am not tying to be nasty, I just don’t understand. I believe that the vast majority of pharmacists, are very intelligent highly educated people who count pills. If I am sick I go to a doctor who writes me a prescription. I take it to a pharmacist, and they count out pills, put them in a bottle, and maybe print out the equivalent of a wikipedia article about possible side effects. Back in the old days pharmacists invented and made drugs, and I suppose some still do. But why do you need that kind of education and pay (I don’t know how much they make, but all the education investment must be worth it or no one would bother) to work the night shift at the shoppers drug mart so I can get anti-biotics for one of my children’s ear aches.
Ahem, Nick and Robert have commented about cutting large numbers of bureaucrats, not doctors, nurses and pharmacists. They’re probably right. Or, at least, the healthcare system managers should be looking very diligently for do-without-able bureaucrats and cut them, before cutting doctors, nurses or pharmacists, or before major cuts in these professionals’ salaries.
Iberian and Inferno both post strawman arguments, as trollers always do.
Typical unionist drivel of nonsense threats.
it’s all going to end badly.
“nick” nails it! The Health Care “elephant” is the multiple layers of bureaucratic hangers-on that deliver little or NO services to anyone. Get rid of these layers instead of the people who actually DO the work,and there’d be no need for austerity measures.
As someone said above,why is it always the little guys who get cut back while the unnecessary managers get raises. Why in hell do we need a public information officer in each HC Region,at about $125,000 per year?
And while you’re at it,Christy, stop the subsidies to all those gawddamned windmills up North and we’d save hundreds of millions.
I am forced to agree with lberia.
My niece will be graduating with her degree in pharmacology in April. She was accepted into the program after completing two years of a science degree and maintaining a straight A average. Follow that with another four years university (heavy on the science courses and don’t let that average slip!) and work terms instead of summer breaks.
But hey maybe Robert thinks that a highly educated pharmacologist and public sector administrators are interchangeable. Good luck with that Robert! I wish you and yours the very best of health and I do mean that sincerly.
Dear Iberia & Greg:
Please don’t put words in my mouth that I never wrote or even thought. My thesis is simple: Why do public sector workers think they’re immune from layoffs and cutbacks just like EVERY single person in the private sector?
As for middle-management types, most every private company and EVERY public sector organization has too many of them.
As for the pharmacists in the hospitals, I wish not a single one of them would lose their job. And wouldn’t it be great if every single one of them made $10 Million per year. But that’s not reality, is it?!
Pharmacists are skilled but not that skilled. They work at Walgrees for less I’m pretty sure. Whole thing should be privatized.
“Dante,Where are these greener pastures?”
Well my friend, I would suggest a place without a 14% wage cut for starters! The truth is that if you can’t afford to pay people what you need to keep them, you will lose them – especially when rural communities crying out for health professionals such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists will gladly pay to keep them.
Just remember that pharmacists have a talent that few others do – they can read a doctor’s handwriting.
Well at least we can hope that they can…….
Over the summer I spent some time hanging out at a silly left-wing blog (American) – you know, I was trying to be open-minded. At one point they were screaming blue murder because some bureaucratic department – the post office, I think – was being downsized, or had a moratorium on hirings or raises or something like that. I asked why, in an economy in which people in the private sector were going out of work all over the place, public employees shoud be immune from market forces at any kind of remove. One commenter answered, more-or-less verbatim, “Well I don’t want those people to be losing their jobs either!”
But they are, Blanche, they are! As if vague good intentions somehow affected economic reality. I proposed at the time that Barry pass legislation ordering the economy to improve; that way, everyone wins.
I’ve seen many financial experts predict that this year, 2012, will be absolutely brutal for the public sector in the U.S. The notion is that Obama’s hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowed money was mostly used to bail out states and municipalities but it only lasted a few years. Now they’re out of money once again, so what to do?
Undoubtedly there’ll be endless new advertisements saying that “the public sector has already been cut to the bone” and “if one more dollar is cut then police officers and firemen and nurses will be forced out of work”. This latter ploy is so typical of the Left and one of the big reasons no serious reform of the public sector has occurred up until now.
Posted by: greg at January 14, 2012 5:33 PM – honestly, greg, why doesn’t your niece just go into Medicine? Seems like that would make more sense for her. I’m sorry but I agree with minuteman and LAS. Doctors diagnose and prescribe; pharmacists count out pills and rely on a computer to tell them when to do automatic refills. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid or unnecessary – the people at my local pharmacy aren’t either – but they aren’t trained rocket surgeons either.
Dante’s point is well taken. Pharmacists should be compensated as well as, or almost as well as, MDs.
Your health and well being in a hospital will owe a lot to the hospital pharmacists.
Yes, MDs do make mistakes, and if the mistakes are caught it is usually by a pharmacist.
Well 14% is not as bad as it looks….your life style might be a little less….there is always the option of leaving…but all those government benifits are not there at private sector pharmacys…and you will actually have to work hard…paid days off …not likley….and you won’t have to listen to the useless shop union stewart;if that would be a benifit….///
Well mamba you might be surprised at how many do go into medicine later on in their careers, I know of one DDS and two GP’s who did just that. By the way my niece already has a job lined up with a private corporation.
And poor LAS as far as not being skilled but not that skilled, well do a little research please before putting your ignorance on display for the world to see. http://tinyurl.com/87859n8
And dear Robert please read what you wrote,
“Pharmacists who work in hospitals in British Columbia will be receiving upwards of a 14% wage cut. Undoubtedly they will be decrying the end of humanity”
Who’s putting words into who’s mouths? Your contempt is all but dripping from your pen for people you haven’t met or heard from!
No, the pharmacists should not be surprised that they may be subjected to a wage cut in the public sector. I don’t think they are frankly.
Pharmacists who work in hospitals, like I did, usually have at least 7 years of training/education and in some cases 9 years or more. A Doctor of Pharmacy, like myself, has the training and experience greater than many family docs and similar to internists, with respect to medical therapy (can’t do procedures though, LOL though). As an undergraduate degree, it is comparable to engineering in intensity and difficulty.
These highly trained pharmacists will go into the private sector where WAGES ARE HIGHER. Yes, you heard that right. Pharmacists in the public sector are paid the same or less than those in the private sector. The payback is that you can use your training and experience, you don’t have to deal with third party payers, and it’s not retail.
I’ve seen this before in the 90’s in Ontario. Hospital pharmacy wages were 20% lower than the private sector at that time and the hospital had 3-4 openings out of a staff of 25 every month.
Plus, this wage cut doesn’t save the health care system much money as there aren’t very many hospital pharmacists in BC (likely 1-2,000 or so) or in fact, in all of Canada.
Valencia – I’m amazed, and very impressed. I guess what I don’t understand is why? Why do pharmacists need to be so highly trained? 7-9 year in, why not go into medicine instead? Are all pharmacists this qualified? (When I called up my pharmacy to ask if it was okay to take synthroid with coffee-and-milk, noone there (maybe half-a-dozen behind the counter) had the slightest clue, and they seemed puzzled as to why I was bothering them with this question.)
Well I am a retired senior with the usual health issues.
Twice in the last coupla years, I have been saved from medical errors by a pharmacist.
The one issue was one that I found using the internet (side effect causing fractures) but I canvased the pharmacist before the GP. The pharmacist was on the blower to my GP immediately…..Get this, the pharmacist could not counsel me to discontinue the medication…only my GP could.
The pharmacist was appalled that his pharmacy had not caught it first….remember drug interactions and side-effects are frequently more the field of phamacists than GPs……GP’s are not real skilled with nutrician either.
The is no doubt that the tail is waging the dog in healthcare, and education.
It reminds me of the 500,000 US servicemen in country when TET kicked off….only about 125,000-130,000 were combat troops, and that’s counting base security as well. The logistics train involved a $hitload of paper pushers….9 to 5, beds, regular meals (warm), showers….
I don’t know how many times the wife has caught another error coming from our pharmacist, I know people with a grade 8 edjumacation who can count better than most of them.
Both my wife and myself are seniors and as sasquatch says have a few health issues. We are not aware of a pharmacist ever making an error in our meds and in fact as others have said have occasionally had questions about a prescription.
As to the thread question, no they should not be immune to the same realities faced by private sector.
FREE – change your pharmacy.
At mine, there are more assistants actually filling out the prescriptions and only one pharmacist on duty.
She’s terrific and can answer any question and give excellent advice.
The assistants count the pills and fill the bottles – under her supervision, of course.
“Robert, are you stupid or just an asshole?”
No, he’s not. I think the definition of “stupid ässhole” is somebody who trolls here repeatedly, flaming every post with inane, stupid leftist boilerplate with nary more than a scant thought about how moronic he appears, to say nothing of identifying with and honoring an arch murderer by taking his name as a blogging ID.
Sound about right, folks?
mhb23re
at gmail d0t calm
Black Mamba
Pharmacists in the community or private sector are seriously underutilized primarily because of regulations and perverse incentives.
Hospital pharmacists, especially PharmDs (Doctor of Pharmacy) are doctors, in the sense that they are experts in drug therapeutics. You really can’t run intensive care, provide chemotherapy, etc without hospitals pharmacists. It’s pretty well standard of care, especially in teaching hospitals. One doc told me I was the best thing to happen to his intensive care unit in over 10 years.
In the old days (ie 30years ago or more), there was a physician specialty called clinical pharmacology. There are still a few of these around in academia and they are wonderful, but this specialty has now morphed into the hospital PharmD for the most part. And the health care system needs highly trained pharmacists because drug therapy is much more important and complex now than 30yrs ago. It is expecting too much of family docs to know the depth and breadth of medical therapeutics/drug therapy required, especially for complex patients. They have enough on their plate.
Hope that answers your question.
Pharmacists in hospitals dont count pills. Most of them dont even come near the medications that are dispensed. Pharmacists monitor drug therapy, participate on rounds, play critical roles in icu, nicu, er, anticoagulation clinics, heart failure clinics, transplant clinics, perform med rec on admission and discharge, provide drug information, etc etc etc. It is unforturnate the public and the government do not understand the actual job of a hospital pharmacist, completely different than the community pharmacist the public only thinks of. Hospital pharmacists use their many years of training and education to ensure patient safety and the best potential health outcomes.