Pharmacy Meltdown: How Toxic Workplaces are Destroying Your Profession with Dolores Neira (Part 1)

Are you feeling like you're in a constant battlefield, trying to navigate the murky waters of negativity within your pharmacy career? Friend, just breathe. You aren't alone and the good news you're in the right place. Let's shift gears from a meltdown to a symphony of harmony in your pharmacy profession. Ready to pivot? Let's dive in with today's guest, dolores Nira. Welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrogenomics. Part of the Pharmacy Podcast Network, a must-have resource for pharmacist entrepreneurs seeking to enhance patient care while enjoying career and life. Join us as we pivot into Nutrogenomics, using pharmacy and nutrition for true patient-focused care. Explore how to improve chronic conditions rather than just manage them. Celebrate entrepreneurial triumphs and receive priceless advice. Align your values with a career that profoundly impacts patients. Together, we'll raise the script on health and pivot into a brighter future. Hello, hello. This is Dr Tamar Lawful, doctor of pharmacy and certified nutritional genomic specialist. Before you listen in, I want to thank our listener of the week, who said: "now I'm realizing that my own genetics, not just my upbringing, controls my outcome of my results when it comes to weight loss and all other health benefits that will affect my quality of life. That is exactly right. It's not just your environment, but your genetics also can play a role. So thank you for sharing your thoughts and I'm glad that you were able to become enlightened from the information you learn in this podcast. Before we dive into our episode of our guests, I really want to have a heart to heart with my fellow pharmacists. You know, there are reflections of feeling overworked, understaffed and underwhelmed amidst the tumultuous situations in a wide pharmacy landscape, particularly resonating with recent nationwide movement PharmaGeddon. In this sea of frustration and burnout, your feelings are far from unusual and definitely not indicative of any personal or professional failure. It's these shared experiences that underline the urgent need for change, for a transition from toxic work environments to an atmosphere of positivity and harmony, and that is exactly where our discussion today gains its relevance. Let our dialogue not only be one of understanding but also one of transformation as we journey collectively from an environment played with toxicity to a tranquil sphere of professional satisfaction. So today we're taking a break from the science of genes and nutrition to focus on the human side of the equation - the Pharmacy Team. a Our guest is positivity powerhouse Dolores Neira. You're in for a real treat, as this remarkable woman has been transformed in the world of corporate culture since 2001, inspiring leaders with her solution-driven mindset, and she's here to share that wisdom with all of us. Before we delve into our heartfelt conversation, let me give you a glimpse of who Dolores is. She passionately believes that brains rule the world, and here's where it gets really interesting. She distinguishes between our brain and our mind as two separate entities that guide our actions and energy. Are you captivated, as I am right now? Dolores is renowned for her vibrant energy, her razor sharp wit and her uncanny ability to create positive working environments. She's a dream maker who consistently designs workplaces where attrition rates plummet and spirits soar to new heights. And if that wasn't inspiring enough, dolores is a published author. Yes, she penned the book a workplace inspired and is a licensed brain health trainer with Dr Daniel Eamon. Her dedication to inspiring leaders and teams is truly unparalleled. So, my friends, let's begin our empowering exchange with Dolores Now. Dolores, as we try to pivot our roles in pharmacy and truly begin to make a difference in our patient's lives, we often find ourselves leading teams, whether as business owners, managers or supervisors. So I'm really interested in knowing how the brain and mind can support the actions and energies of people in these positions. So what's the difference between a brain and a mind?

So first of all, I'd like to say thank you for having me tomorrow. We go way back and you and I share a desire to seek wellness, and I feel like we have to start with the brain. I'll get to answering your question here in a minute, but I do have my little brain right here.

Oh sure.

So this brain, right here when you're in the workplace, it functions more than anything, right here in the prefrontal cortex. So I tell folks that this is what we have to focus on when we're in the workplace, because the prefrontal cortex handles your organization, your focus, your empathy. It focuses on the tasks that you need in the workplace. And so when I do trainings and I share that information I share that if you're not good to your brain specifically, your prefrontal cortex will suffer and you'll come to work less than 100%. So if you're already coming to work less than 100%, ready to tackle the challenges of the day, and you have constraints or you have requests on your time and on your effort and your energy, that's over the top. You're already going to be kind of setting yourself up for I wouldn't say failure, but the challenges will be able to kind of take you down easily and I think that that's why I was so interested to come here and speak with you today. Tomorrow is, I know that the pharmaceutical industry, and the pharmacists specifically, are going through some challenges right now. You never think about that. So, to answer your question, the brain is physical. This is physical, this can be damaged and in fact, the brain is easily damaged. We don't think about the brain being the first thing that we have to take care of, because boxers, football players we have to realize how much impact we're making on the brain. The brain is only about six pounds and the brain is housed in a, the skull right, but it's a bony ridges. If you looked underneath the skull and the brain is a consistency of butter or cream cheese, and so when you bang that, that's when you get your concussions because you're hitting it against those bony ridges of the skull. So I say all that to tell you that the brain is physical. It's the biology of your brain, but your mind is imaginary and all the functions that your mind thinks and creates will influence the brain. It's almost like the filter. The mind is the filter. We've gone through many, many situations in our lives. Memories were built and all that is stored in the mind, and so I see the mind is like a filter and then it affects the brain. I don't know if you've ever heard the quote that says your thoughts become your feelings, your feelings become your actions and your actions become who you are. That's because you've allowed the mind to begin to focus or to influence the brain function for the long term. You know, you could talk about drug addiction, you could talk about anything like that, and the mind will begin that process to start to hurt the brain. But that's really the difference. The brain is the biological or the physical, and then the mind is more of the imaginary and the functions that we see in life. We see through the mind first, so we can, you know how you say, have a positive mindset. That's because the mind can really focus first and then allow the negativity to affect the brain.

Wow. So it sounds to me that the mind is very powerful.

Very powerful and we forget that it's in there. You know we got this little six pound thing that it actually takes 30% of your calories to keep your brain functioning optimally, and so when we go on these fasts where we're only eating like 500 calories a day, that's why we get the brain fog and that kind of thing, because you're like you're bracing weight, I need some more here, you can't think too well with the little bit of the brain needs it.

Yeah, so I can definitely see how the not just the physical brain, but the imaginative brain, the mind, will definitely support our actions and energy and our pharmacists and certain environments, as you mentioned.

If we don't know how to a deal or reframe our mind to walk into certain work conditions, it can indeed be detrimental to we're less apt to handle stress, really if you wanted in a summary form, when you haven't been taking care of your brain and the way that we don't take care of our brain is by not having enough water, not sleeping seven hours minimum, not having those greens, you know those, all those superfoods that are encouraged for us to have, not taking them, the right meds if you're dealing with any kind of medical issues and you're not taking the appropriate meds, that'll affect the brain as well. And then just social you know a lot of us, because of COVID, have become very anti-social or introverted and the brain needs that and needs the stimulation of other people and relationships and that kind of thing, definitely positive relationships, impivoting slightly.

Going back to what the pharmacy profession is facing right now, with walkouts and unsafe working conditions, how do you feel that these situations could be managed in a way to promote better brain health?

So let's go to the core. The core is that the demand is a lot higher now, post COVID or while we're transitioning out of COVID, than it was prior to COVID in 2018-2019. We just thought that it was going to be transitional to where it would be. What did we say at first? Three months, six months, oh, a year max. And you know, we're still kind of telling what that year, two and a half, three years later. So it's a basic business principle supplying the man we have the man. Do we have the supply? And again, the industry, specifically your industry, feels like maybe, oh, we're just going to hold on and add a few more people. You know, no, no, no, this is the new norm for I think, for a while, you need, I think businesses need to look at increasing their staff, increasing especially the frontline staff who deal with the client, deal with the customers. I just recently, if I can use my example, I just recently went to my pharmaceutical department and it was just almost perfectly fitting what we were going to talk about today, because it's fresh. It was just yesterday. Last night I went and I said, oh, I gotta get this, you know this meds and I'm out. I usually don't wait till I'm out, but I was out. It was an insurance glitch and so you have to deal with those kinds of things. But I literally, after I want to say probably 20 years of going to the same company for my pharmaceutical needs, I'm thinking of not doing that any longer. I think I'm thinking of going somewhere else. And it was basically the fact that I got treated as if I was no one and my urgency was not their urgency, and rolled eyes and you know individuals who were just not caring, not kind, not empathetic. I'm sure that they see a lot of people that do this. Come at the last minute, you know, but I'm not. You could look at my 20 year experience. I'm always ahead of the game. It's just there's a glitch in this one thing, and but the way that I felt treated by frontline staff, that didn't make me feel very special at all. Then the actual pharmacist came out and I said I just need you to clarify this with one thing, please. And all he did was just write something on a piece of paper, hand it back to me and I thought okay, well, we're waiting for an answer. Didn't speak. Didn't speak, didn't say let me help you. Goodbye, thank you. I said are we done? He just wrote a number I should call and I started to turn around and I said he didn't say goodbye or anything. Maybe are we not done. Am I supposed to wait? I'm like what, how long will it take you to say thank you? This is where you go next. That's seconds.

Yeah, so you can imagine the stress that they're under. They're not. They're not even having that connection anymore with the customers or patients that are coming in. They're on stressful environments, insufficient staffing, as you mentioned, and probably even in environments where the people they report to their leaders are being more reactive versus proactive, not thinking ahead of time of how they can actually support these pharmacists, but being reactive. And when pharmacists are now disgruntled, now maybe collectively, they're taken action. So would you agree that the pharmacy staff, from the front end to the pharmacist, are just not happy?

No, they didn't. I didn't even know if they were, because this was at the tail end where they were going to close like within half an hour. And the gal who came up to me, she didn't have any kind of clothing that showed that she was from there. She looked like she was a customer just coming around, and so I was just puzzled all the way through and all I remember saying is okay, so what do I need to do next? And everything was no, no, no, no. And I thought, okay, but explain it, I need my medicine, you know. And I said do you think that? Like I was asking the questions and she was just giving me the no or the yes, and then finally, she just told the pharmacist. Actually, I caught the pharmacist going by the window and I said, excuse me, I was assertive, you know, because I'm like this is me, I don't do this, but now I know how people feel, who are always doing it at the last minute. Anyway, I it was just too coincidental that I had this experience just seven o'clock last night. I said I'm going to use this.

Don't take it personally. Don't take it personally. These are right. It's kind of fortunate that those conditions that are pharmacists are under effects, how they feel or how they interact.

So, tied into that, what would you say the cost is in environments like this, when, when grievances are not addressed, so there's a book it's actually a training class that I train and it's called the no complaining rule but it talks about the cost of negativity to the American workforce. And this book is probably about it's post COVID, so it's definitely a little older, but it's still valid and it holds a lot of truth. But one of their statements according to the Gallup poll that they took that negativity in the workplace costs the American business world in an average of 250 billion dollars a year. Wow, not a million Billion. That's a huge number, a huge. And why? Because we focus on our feelings and you know we're feeling with people we were empathetic with. But when you yell at me, when you cuss at me, when you look at me incorrectly in the workplace, I will not work well for the rest of the day and may not even come back. And unfortunately, you know that the baby boomers back in the day, or the traditionalists, those were the generations that would be treated whatever way that they were treated, but they were there, right, and they came back to work. We don't have that anymore. We know that the millennials have so many choices, so you treat them badly. They're out. That dedication is not there.

Right.

You work with a team of medical professionals for about two years and you'd have individuals who were medical assistants or you know, phlebotomists or just different people, different roles in the medical realm, and I was working with their teams and if the boss or their supervisor said something to them that they didn't like, you would almost know they weren't coming back the next day and they'd call out or they'd say I'm putting my notice, I'm not coming back. Now everybody is the me generation. How do I feel about this? And if you have a leader who is not empathetic, who needs leadership development, let's just say it could just make or break your whole company.

Yeah, I definitely can. If you have employees leaving them, that's going to lead to shortages and in a healthcare setting, that's going to impact the patient care.

Well, I'm not saying coddle every employee. I'm saying my point is the workforce has changed. When we're going through a pandemic, what are you thinking about? Oh my, put my mask on, you know, getting my hands washed. How am I going to react to this? Why would I want to go to work in an organization that I might get sick and die? I am the focus and that's for a positive, strong workforce. We have to be about the we. We have to. You know, we need to focus on our goal. So I think that that's what I do. I have a passion I've been doing that for over 20 years where I can go in and I can identify, kind of the weak areas and really it's just a matter of doing a little training, talking to the leadership there. But there has to be a commitment, because this change isn't going to happen with one weekend training. It has to go for six months at least before people say, okay, I see the change, I'm going to jump on that and I'm going to be the way you know they're really serious about but, if one little weekend retreats you know four hours, the ones who are, you know the core of the issues. they'll just pretend for four hours and walk on, yeah.

We'll continue our conversation with our guests in our next episode. The lawyers has proved that team morale in a positive work environment are as crucial to patient care as proper dispensing and disease management. If any part of this conversation sparked interest or resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn at Dr Tamar Lawful. You can also leave a five star review and comment here in this podcast so you can help guide other pharmacists on a similar journey. If you haven't already subscribed, rate and download this episode to ensure you're always in the loop.