Armed robberies have become a common and disturbing fact of life for many working behind pharmacy counters. With that dismal reality in mind, it makes sense companies would take steps to prepare workers for the possibility that someone brandishing a weapon may one day walk in and demand narcotics from the pharmacy's stock.
That appears to be the reasoning behind an exercise conducted in 2007 at the Hampton Behavioral Health Center in New Jersey. The training session in question involved a masked gunman bursting into the store claiming to have one of the pharmacy's workers as a hostage and demanding that a tech give him Oxycontin, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
What the pharmacy tech, Babette Perry, claims she didn't know at the time was the gunman was an employee of the company acting out a robbery scenario.
Following the event, Ms. Perry learned from the the person believed to have been taken hostage, the human resources director at the company, that everything was staged as part of a safety drill designed by Hampton and its parent company Universal Health Services.
Ms. Perry has recently filed a suit against her employer and Universal claiming she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Ms. Perry believed that the gunman was capable of shooting her or holding her hostage," according to the lawsuit, filed last month. The suit claims that Ms. Perry was never informed she would have to take part in the drill as part of her employment and was not trained in how to properly handle such a scenario.
United Health
Services declined comment.
Discussion
Questions: Is the type of drill described in this story useful in helping store
employees deal with armed robbers? Are there better ways
to train workers to deal with these types of situations?