The latest installment of the Pharmacy Workplace and Well-Being Reporting (PWWR) confirmed the ongoing trend of pharmacy staffs working in hostile conditions.
The PWWR, launched in October 2021, “serves as a safe space to submit both positive and negative pharmacy workplace experiences in a confidential and anonymous manner,” the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) said in an Aug. 21 news announcement of the tenth PWWR report. “The goal of PWWR is to tell the stories of those who submit their experiences so that the profession may begin to act on the findings and learnings.”
The latest PWWR installment reported on the second quarter of 2024.
Pharmacy staffs still enduring abusive behavior
Since its creation in late 2021, the PWWR has received more than 2,200 submissions, including 108 submissions for the latest installment.
For the second quarter, 60% of respondents identified themselves as pharmacists, while 20% were pharmacy managers/supervisors/pharmacists in charge. Pharmacy owners accounted for 3% of this quarter’s respondents, while another 3% of reporters were pharmacy technicians. Two respondents were pharmacy students.
Respondents work in a wide range of practice settings, including supermarket pharmacies, mass-merchant pharmacies, independent pharmacies, hospital/institutional pharmacies, and chain pharmacies with four or more locations.
“The findings from this cycle mirror those of the past nine, highlighting a continued trend of a hostile workplace,” said Brigid K. Groves, PharmD, MS, APhA vice president of professional affairs. “Pharmacy personnel should not face safety fears or abuse from patients, supervisors or coworkers. Organizations must review harassment policies and reporting procedures and adopt a zero-tolerance stance against abuse. In response, APhA has released a zero tolerance flyer for pharmacies to post in public areas of the pharmacy.”
Nine of the 108 respondents reported positive experiences via the PWWR. The other 99 reports were negative.
Understaffing at the root of many negative reports
Among negative reports, staffing/scheduling and workload expectations were most commonly mentioned.
Respondents also reported negatively on working conditions; pharmacy metrics; training and education; and having their professional judgment restricted when caring for a patient.
For Q2, 11 respondents said they had personal safety concerns.
And 91% of respondents who submitted negative reports said the problems were recurring ones.
Harassment at work continues to be a commonly reported problem, with 33 respondents saying they’d experienced verbal, emotional or sexual harassment on the job, and five respondents reporting being threatened with physical harm or actually suffering physical harm.
Understaffing was common when negative experiences were reported: Just 3% of respondents said staffing was not a root cause of their negative experiences.
Inadequate staffing was the most commonly reported root cause of the negative experiences that were shared, though many respondents said their negative experiences had more than one root cause.
“The negative experiences this cycle included many of the same threatening and abusive stories
described in detail in the previous analysis,” the PWWR report said. “As previously noted, these stories tell a highly personal account of the difficulties in working in retail pharmacy. … There were 460 total root causes listed for the 99 negative experiences reported, averaging nearly 4.7 root causes per event (compared to 4.8 root causes per event in the last reporting cycle). Nearly all the negative experience reports (91%) were described as a ‘recurring problem.’”
As for the takeaways for this installment, “positive experiences were infrequently reported. There were nine reports this period,” the PWWR summary said. “These reports did not offer compelling stories that have not been described in previous analyses.”
The summary also acknowledged similarly familiar negative reports.
“The themes overtly expressed in the negative experiences submitted in this 10th analysis period remain fundamentally unchanged when compared to previous periods,” the summary said. “There were two notable and unique findings that were not seen in previous analyses.
“One reporter questioned APhA’s intentions in collecting PWWR Experience Reports. A different reporter called out APhA, NCPA [National Community Pharmacists Association], and Congress for failing to fix systemic problems in pharmacy.”
And several pharmacy professionals confirmed that current events are also impacting their workplaces.
“The other notable finding is that several reporters are stating that the Israeli-Hamas conflict has affected co-worker and customer relationships in an overtly negative way. External politics being brought into the workplace is not unexpected and mostly likely an unavoidable circumstance; however, the reporters who were adversely affected did not mention if there were workplace rules about how these conflicts would be managed or if there were administrative systems to do so.”
