“A never-ending job in demand” [pharmacists] “CVS has made it nearly impossible to provide patients with the help they deserve, increasing the likelihood of fatal errors,” one pharmacist said, adding that the company is seeking compensation from the federal health department. However, he was accused of helping to fuel the nation’s opioid crisis. care program.
Prosecutors say in the lawsuit that CVS pharmacists were pressured to fill prescriptions as quickly as possible without evaluating the validity of the prescriptions, and that the company kept staffing levels very low. “It was impossible for pharmacists to comply with their legal obligations and respond to CVS’s requests,” it said. index. ”
CVS claimed the agency was trying to impose “changing standards of pharmacy practice.”
A CVS spokesperson said in a statement to the Globe on Thursday that the company is “committed to providing consistent, safe and high-quality health care.”
“We are working to ensure appropriate levels of staffing and resources in our stores and pharmacies, ensuring our teams can schedule additional support as needed, and recruiting and hiring pharmacists and technicians. We are making targeted investments to address the feedback, including strengthening our staff and training for our pharmacy technicians,” the spokesperson said.
The company also said it would “aggressively” contest the lawsuit.
Still, prosecutors say CVS has repeatedly ignored complaints from pharmacists that its pharmacies are “dangerously understaffed,” including complaints made to management through an “ethics line” run by the company. It also claims to include hundreds of complaints.
“One pharmacy employee wrote that staffing at CVS is so inadequate that pharmacists cannot ‘have basic human rights like going to the bathroom.’ Because people will disappear,” the lawsuit says. state. “Another wrote: ‘Store’… being forced to work in skeleton crews, resulting in employees being mentally and physically overworked.”
According to prosecutors, one pharmacist was unable to go to the bathroom during a 13-hour shift and developed a urinary tract infection. Another man vomited on the side of the road during his after-work commute “because he didn’t have time to eat all day,” according to the lawsuit.
In a 2021 survey by the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy, CVS pharmacists reported that they “feel… [they] I’m drowning and no one can help me [them]” the complaint states.
“when [I] expressed concern. . . “We were told that giving them more labor costs for patient safety and regulatory compliance would erode ‘shareholder value,'” one survey respondent was quoted as saying.
According to the complaint, CVS has developed “labor standards” that define the amount of time it takes pharmacy staff to fill prescriptions and complete other tasks. However, prosecutors allege that the company did not evaluate “whether these pharmacists actually performed their duties in accordance with their legal and professional obligations.”
Additionally, prosecutors allege, CVS set performance metrics based on the volume of prescriptions filled and rewarded pharmacists who exceeded those targets with higher bonuses. The complaint also states that employees could be subject to disciplinary action or poor performance reviews if they do not take their prescriptions quickly enough.
“[S]”Safety issues arise when we’re handling drugs and when we’re busy fulfilling orders like McDonald’s,” one employee complained.
One pharmacist admitted that he often ignored computer warnings that identified dangerous prescription combinations because he could barely survive the flood of prescriptions that were coming his way. [their] “How to verify this,” the complaint states.
Employees reported concerns that “staffing shortages will lead to.” . . “This was a fatal mistake for the patient,” the complaint states.
In July 2020, the Oklahoma State Board of Pharmacy fined CVS for conditions at four pharmacies, including dispensing errors, and Virginia officials said for two years that “pharmacists were It issued numerous citations to CVS related to its failure to verify “the number of prescriptions dispensed,” federal prosecutors said, adding that “understaffing contributed to the error.”
On Thursday, a CVS spokesperson said the company uses “robotics and automation to assist with prescription writing,” has spent $1 billion in wage increases and other investments over the past three years, and has “approximately $70 million in “We have paid a bonus,” he said. Pharmacists and frontline workers in 2024.
“From a co-worker and customer service perspective, our company is in a better place now than it has been in recent years,” a CVS spokesperson said in an email. “Customer and colleague satisfaction continues to improve, and turnover is lower than before the pandemic.”
Helena Foulkes, president of CVS Pharmacy from 2014 to 2018, also defended the company.
“We were in conflict [the opioid] He campaigned unsuccessfully for Rhode Island governor in 2022 and is believed to be considering running again against incumbent Gov. Dan McKee.
“I led a team that did this by leveraging technology to identify physicians who were abusing the system and enacting procedures to prevent overprescribing,” she said. “Despite all the work we did, we were sued by physicians and several state authorities for not refilling enough opioids.”
The case became political fodder Thursday, as McKee’s campaign pointed to the federal complaint as “misconduct that occurred during Helena Foulkes’ term in office.”
“The allegations in the Department of Justice lawsuit regarding the conduct of certain CVS employees during the opioid crisis that began in 2013 are deeply disturbing,” McKee said in a statement. “We must hold accountable the greedy executives who profited from their organizations by spreading addiction throughout their communities.”
Foulkes responded by accusing McKee of “attempting to distract from failed leadership” and “misrepresenting the facts about one of the state’s largest employers.”
CVS says it has made improvements, but in 2023 workers, along with Walgreens and Rite Aid employees, went on strike across the country to pressure management to hire more workers, and in Rhode Island Five CVS retail stores voted in favor of unionizing. According to Shane Gerominci, a California-based pharmacist and co-founder of the Pharmacy Guild, a national labor union.
“The simple truth of the matter is that CVS and companies like CVS are not allocating the resources we need to do our jobs effectively,” Gerominci told the Globe. “We are always understaffed.”
Globe staff member Amanda Milkowitz contributed to this report.
Christopher Gavin can be reached at [email protected].
