This story starts about 3 weeks ago, when I called the Safeway Pharmacy at 3rd and Franklin to try to refill my Trazodone prescription. Much to my surprise their automated system said that the prescription was no longer valid; I tried 5 separate times, thinking that I’d entered the prescription number incorrectly. I got the same message each time.
My records showed that the prescription was valid through January 28, 2015 so I was more than a little confused about why I couldn’t fill it again.
I called my doctors’ office the next morning to see what was going on, and the medical receptionist said that they would send a new prescription to the pharmacy. I was told it would take about 3 days for the prescription to be filled. I was also told that if this happened in the future I should talk to the pharmacy first before calling my doctors’ office.
During the 3 days, I discovered that I had grabbed an old Trazodone bottle rather than the most recent one. I’d also figured out that I’d called the prescription in about a week before it was eligible for a refill. I had at least a weeks’ worth of the pills left. So I figured I would be able to refill the prescription in a week or 10 days.
Apparently the prescription had never been sent to Safeway by my doctor either, since I picked up several other prescriptions during the month that didn’t include the Trazodone. But since I had several pills left it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Once the 16th of January rolled around, I tried refilling the prescription and got the same message from Safeway. I took the bottle to the pharmacy itself and found out that their records showed that the prescription strength was wrong. Once we got that straightened out, I got the refill that same day.
I also thought nothing more about the communication with my doctors’ office since I didn’t need them to call in the prescription. To be honest, that isn’t quite true. I was pretty ticked off that a medical receptionist had apparently made the decision to not help me get my prescription, and I really didn’t think that she was qualified to make that decision. It turned out that she probably had nothing to do with this mess.
There are several Mosaic Medical clinics through out Central Oregon, and up until April 2014 I was being seen at the Greenwood clinic. After about mid-April I went to Bridges Health which is also a part of Mosaic Medical. In fact, one of the doctors at the Greenwood clinic was the person who referred me to Bridges Health.
Then yesterday January 29th 2015 I receive a phone call from my doctors’ office at Bridges Health wondering why I had contacted them about the Trazodone since “it wasn’t prescribed by us.”
I about fell off my chair because it was prescribed by a doctor at Mosaic Medical, which is basically the same thing as Bridges Health. In fact, the brochures and signage for Bridges Health have Mosaic Medical all over them.
I did point out that the prescribing doctor was located at the Greenwood clinic, and that it had probably been Mark Press who prescribed it. Robin (the nurse from Bridges Health who called me) basically ignored that and went right into ‘how long have you been taking this’ and ‘what was it prescribed for.’
Hey, Nurse Robin, YOU are the one with access to my health records for the last 4 plus years. YOU should be able to answer your own questions by simply looking at those records.
I’ve been a client at Bridges Health since April 2014, and was a client at Mosaic Medical’s Greenwood clinic for 3 years and 8 months. I transferred to Bridges directly from the Greenwood clinic. Additionally, Bridges has all my records from Bend Memorial Clinic, Central Oregon Radiology Associates, and St Charles Medical Center (our local hospital), so I do think that Robin could have found the answers to the questions about the Trazodone by simply accessing my (exhaustively complete) records.
I was also more than a little irritated that the call came nearly three weeks after I’d originally contacted them. If this had been a really important medicine such as my Glipizide (for diabetes) or my Eliquis (powerful blood thinner), a three week (well, to be picky about it, an 18 day wait including weekends and holidays) wait for my medication and/or a call back could have been seriously injurious to my health, which would have been rather ironic since they are in the job of trying to keep me healthy!
Even though the Trazodone was prescribed simply to help me sleep, I don’t think that a nearly three week wait for a callback about any medication is appropriate.
I also don’t think it’s appropriate to jump to the conclusion that ‘we didn’t prescribe this for you’ without checking my medical records. Really, would I have called them about the problem if they hadn’t prescribed the medication?
Additionally, I do not have another clinic or doctor that I regularly see unless they have referred me to said clinic/ doctor. So, who would have prescribed the Trazodone for me? The man in the moon, maybe???
I also think if someone is calling me about a medication that they DID actually prescribe that they should KNOW what it was prescribed for.
Robin–the nurse who called–pretended to be concerned about how long I had been off the medication; I say pretended because if she ware really concerned about it she would have called back 1 or 2 days after I originally called them, not almost three weeks later. As it turned out I was only without the Trazodone for a couple of days, not long enough to feel any withdrawal symptoms (not that Robin would have cared, because again if she gave a rip I wouldn’t have gotten the phone call EIGHTEEN DAYS after I contacted Bridges!).