Written by Dr. Okafor. In 2016, following an incident between my physician assistant (PA), Dr. Afroze S., and a locum pharmacist in the Walmart Pharmacy. Dr (Mrs.) Afroze is a Foreign Medical Graduate from Bangladesh.
On this occasion, the pharmacist, on his first day as locum at the local Walmart pharmacy, had received a patient from an outside office who had a prescription with an error of dosage. He then asked the patient to go to the walk-in clinic for a corrected script. I was away from the clinic at the time with the PA left in charge to offer basic services as this. She duly took a proper, basic history and rewrote the script. However, per standing protocol, did so without a signature, as she is not qualified to sign prescriptions, the standing arrangement with the pharmacy being for the pharmacist to validate all such scripts with me before filling them.

This was this pharmacist’s first day and apparently, he had not been made aware of this. Frustrated that he sent a patient in with one script error and she returned with another he barged into the clinic demanding for a signature on the script. Afroze refused, explaining why. He raised such a raucous that his employer, the Walmart store management, forbade him from coming back to work at that store. He would vent his anger over this by sending extremely exaggerated letters to both the College of Pharmacists and the College of Physicians with fabricated allegations that were unrelated to the events of the case.

The College of Pharmacy came and quickly dismissed these allegations as superfluous. My College’s agents also paid us a visit during which we explained the entire incident clearly and apparently satisfactorily and they left. We expected this was the end of it. Months later they returned, this time under a different investigator, Ms. Lindsey Thornbull, who came with an aggressive, unsmiling attitude, taking over the consult rooms, and perusing office records. I was aghast. There was no reason for this, for what was obviously a dubious report and my disapproval may have shown in my granting her full access to rooms and records but with a stiff-lipped lack of pleasantries. This tactless display of my displeasure was of course based on a naivety that the CPSO and its operatives are an ethics-bound and truth-powered operation and that no matter what one’s countenance was, only truth would ever matter in the end. I now know this, lamentably, to have been a very lethal error.”

“Ms. Lindsay would go on to drag on with turning our patients’ records upside down, and finding no faults outside of minor, petty departures with the rigors of preferred standards e.g. not writing the length in millimeters of a TB reaction site that tested positive and a few such scanty but accurate visit records would order that I go for several remedial courses, including an opioid prescription course, not for something I did but for what she deemed excessive opioid prescription by a locum physician who covered for me when I was on vacation! Nevertheless, I diligently obliged, completing these obstacle courses and finishing them all. This battering of my practice and resources, stemming from a baseless report, would continue, astoundingly, for years. The blatant victimization of a practice and practitioner which was easily apparent as being above a province-wide average in its professionalism and clinical acumen was well underway.”