It is so interesting to hear all the different ways hospitals do things. Our P & T meets every month and our Clinical Coordinator chairs the committee and our Director goes to the meetings as well. Depending on the topics, other Pharmacists with particular knowledge also attend. Our clinical Pharmacist and Director confer with me on the topics that have something to do with supply, demand and other buyer functions. We have excellent communication between the Clinical Coordinator Pharmacist, Director of Pharmacy and the Pharmacy Manager and this helps a lot.
Name of Facility: St. Francis health Center
City, State: Acute
Years as a Buyer: 4+ in Pharmacy 25 in retail hard goods
I think my knowledge of shortages, new generics coming out, costs, etc. would be a real asset to the P & T meetings, but I never have been included.
Our committee meets monthly with 2 clinical pharmacists, dept. director and dept. manager attending, as well as many doctors.
I hear about additions/deletions from the formulary after the fact. Occasionally, I am asked to checking costs for a new drug or one that we want to autosub.
Our communication here is ridiculous. Anytime I notice that a drug has been mfg out for 3-4 days, I let the clinical pharmacist know sO we can have some options available to the doctors. His usual response is to shrug and walk away from me. Good thing I have a healthy ego!!
Oh Jeri
Do not be disheartened. It could happen sooner than you think.
Like Kathy, I prepare the Hard to find list for my supervisor. The clinicals are constantly doing clinical analysis for medications they want to add and remove from the formulary. The resident and intern pharmacists help prepare the presentation--so I am key in supplying the nessary and relevant information. I am happy that I have not been asked to attend the P & T meetings.
This is a very interesting discussion. I remember when I was Pharmacy Contract Administrator for a large national pharmacy purchasing group. We had 43 members of our Advisory Committee, one from every shareholder system that was part of the large buying group. At one time, 41 members were Pharmacy Director type positions and 2 members were actually Pharmacy Buyers. Whenever supply issues came up, the buyers would be asked about current supply problems, as the pharmacists were so many years out of line responsibility for procurement that they knew how supply problems may have been 10 years ago, but tended to not have current knowledge. The Pharmacy Buyers were an invaluable resource for that Advisory Committee.
Name of Facility: Editor-In-Chief, Pharmacy Purchasing Outlook
I had the opportunity last week to attend our P and T, now called Medication Management Committee. Our Drug Info Pharmd., brought up switching from Cefoxitin IV preop to Cefotan preop, because she was alerted by our National Committee, that Cefotan was readily available. I asked the question, did someone here actually check the availability , and the answer was no. So when someone did actually check , Cefotan is available, but definitely not at the quantities we would want to start converting back to using it as our first choice for pre op. This is now on hold.
Just this one thing leads me to believe that we in our positions do have valuable information that could be utilized better? I am not looking for more work, believe me, but just the example above shows no one has all the correct answers.