pharmacist duties

| 3 Comments

So, an employee of Walgreens can decide on his own how best to fulfill his job duties? Cool.

Chicago Tribune | No middle ground for pharmacist
Pharmacist John Menges heard the clicking of heels in the Walgreens store where he worked, and his heart raced. Tipped by a fellow pharmacist, Menges knew his managers were coming for his $100,000-a-year job because he refused on religious grounds to comply with state law and company policy to dispense an emergency contraceptive.

“It just hurts,” Menges recalled telling former co-workers that morning in late November. “But I'm not going to compromise on my beliefs.”

I still don't understand Mr. Menges and why he is so reluctant to work somewhere else if dispensing contraceptives is abhorrent to him. If I worked for Walgreens or any retail store in the US, I would have to charge a 'service fee' of twice whatever the price of the item was, payable directly to me, in cash, to anyone who didn't wear either a pirate eye patch or have a parrot perched on their left shoulder. Because of my religion, of course. I'm not going to compromise on my beliefs either. And if you fire me, I plan on suing. For do the scriptures not say, “God helps those who help themselves to the riches of others?” Or something. Ahem.

The company said it offered Menges work just 30 miles to the west in Missouri, where there are no state Plan B mandates. Menges refused, a company spokesman said.

Walgreens put him on unpaid leave, but the company terminated him when Menges filed for unemployment, the spokesman said. Menges says the company never offered workable alternatives and that the company's actions were tantamount to firing him. Walgreens' offer of a job in Missouri came with a demotion to graduate student pay, Menges said, and would have had him floating from store to store.

Until the Illinois directive, Walgreens rode a delicate balance, allowing pharmacists to opt out of filling prescriptions on moral grounds while finding another pharmacist or pharmacy to fill them.

While many national experts on pharmacists' ethics oppose the directives, some wonder why Menges would not choose alternative employment. The metro St. Louis area is short dozens of needed pharmacists, industry experts said, and Menges could continue to do vital service.

“He could work in a hospital or a mail-order facility or a nearby state,” said Robert Buerkl, a pharmacy professor at Ohio State University and an expert in industry ethics. “Why would you want to work in a place where people get in your face?”

Seriously, why would you?

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3 Comments

This just wouldn't happen in the UK. No pharmacist may withold a legal drug if they have it in stock and it has been prescribed by a doctor. Non-prescribed drugs are up to them but since most people live within a reasonable distance of two pharmacies it wouldn't matter so much and competition would have it's effect.
Having said all that, I don't think it is acceptable to impose your own beliefs on others when clearly there is a choice about what you do and where you do it. If he truely had no choice about where to work it might be a different matter, but then he could always decline and call another member of staff over to serve the customer. Sounds to me like he wanted to make a bigger deal of it.

There is such a virulent strain of religiosity in the US - folks who think their beliefs trump all else, and don't mind badgering their fellow citizens. In their minds, the laws of the land don't apply to them, because their religion instructs them a certain way. I'm usually an extremely tolerant fellow, but these nutters bother me.

People like this guy do things like this simply because they're drama queens. He wants to pretend he's a martyr. I'm sure he's working somewhere else by now, and he got to flatter his ego by getting his name in the newspaper. People in his church think he's some kind of hero. His son looks at his dad as something other than the wuss he probably is in other aspects of his life. He got a little self-esteem by taking it from someone else. All at very little cost to himself.

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This page contains a single entry by Seth A. published on March 6, 2006 6:44 PM.

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