Hospital Pharmacy Technician Workflow Structure
Need junior management advice. There is much leeway in the work culture for techs here, as many have been here for years. With lower staff numbers, techs are being asked to do more with the same staffing levels. There is a severe ‘silo’ mentality of only doing the specific job they are assigned to. To rectify this issue, I have come up with some ideas to get techs to be more dynamic in helping each other if bottlenecks arise. I have tried to get techs to spontaneously help each other, to ask others for help, etc. Night shift is a bigger problem. Very little gets done there. I have talked to techs individually, some repeatedly, and they either say they will comply, then do not, or they complain about the lack of support, which has some merit. (The company has several review the boss criticism sessions, which further undermines authority.) These options can be taken as all or a la cart.
Check-off sheets:
Have a large, landscape sized paper, delineating tech responsibilities in the pharmacy. When the task is complete, have each tech check-off the task. The biggest work load is pyxis, as IV compounding is few and mostly stocked in pyxis. For instance:
- AM pyxis, PM pyxis
- IV duties, including regulatory
- Clerk, including phones, stock outs, meds not loaded, prepacking
- General duties: fill prepack bins, crash carts
- Assign multiple roles and tier them per tech:
- Each tech will have a primary role, e.g. IV, but then also help pull meds for pyxis, do bins, etc., as a secondary role. Each day the check-off list will be the responsibility of those two techs.
- I obsessively monitor everyone and do multiple write-ups. This is something I do not have experience in and it seems is distracting of my other duties.