Fairy Mills, a pharmacy technician and member of UFCW Local 555, has worked for Kaiser Permanente for 29 years. Not long ago, however, there were days she left the Mt. Scott Pharmacy ready to cry, exhausted. Wait times were up and service scores had plummeted. She thought about retiring but decided to tough it out—and was voted in as the union co-lead for the department’s unit-based team.
About the same time, Linh Chau arrived as the new supervisor. He wasn’t sure what he’d stepped into. “It was the perfect storm,” he says. “The team was stressed out, members were unhappy, membership was up, and in the midst of it all, we were implementing a new software system.”
Pharmacies in the Northwest region were in a tough spot a year or so ago—and that was especially true for the Mt. Scott Pharmacy. Part of the Sunnyside campus, it’s the second busiest pharmacy in the region, seeing an average of 500 patients a day and filling nearly 1,000 prescriptions.
Although other regions had already made the transition to ePIMS, a software system that syncs up with KP HealthConnect®, the migration process hadn’t been easy.
“We had to reenergize the team,” Chau says.
Chau and Mills’ first strategy was to give staff members confidence that things would improve. The two co-leads began rounding, checking in with UBT members regularly and making sure everyone had a chance to offer suggestions for improvement— giving them the power to shape how things are done, one of the key elements for beating back burnout.
