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VOLUME 22, NUMBER 22
JUNE 6,1975
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
Two Hospital Secretaries Demonstrate.
"Handicapped'' Is Only a State of Mind
TWO GOOD FRIENDS — Marie Boring and her seeing-eye dog
Tamba have made the journey through the halls of the medical
center often in the past six years. The 11-year-oId German
shepherd has cataracts and a heart condition and may soon have
to yield her job to a younger dog. (Photo by David Williamson)
Pharmacy Improves Service
By Adopting Digital Call System
By David Williamson
What’s it like to live in a world of
darkness?
You’d never see wiidflowers in the
spring, fireworks on the Fourth of
July or nature’s artwork on the trees
of autumn.
Your children’s laughter and
crying would only be sounds without
sight, and the record of their growth
would be remembered in your mind’s
eye solely by the deepening of their
voices and the periodic touch of
slightly larger limbs.
For a person with good vision,
imagining it might bring on a sudden
panic of helplessness or a
feather-stroke of fear.
But being blind, according to two
medical center secretaries who
cannot see, is not the end of one’s
personal world nor the incapacitating
conditon it once was.
Both women—Rebecca Buckner of
the Psychiatric Resident’s Office and
Marie Boring of the Medical
Resident’s Office—work regular
hours on regular jobs. And they work
for the same reasons everyone else
does.
“A disability is a disability, and
there’s no getting around that,” Mrs.
Buckner said. “But you just do the
best you can with it and go on.”
The young mother is a victim of
The Pharamcy Department has
announced the adoption of a new
system for prescription-filling in the
Outpatient Pharmacy which
promises to be both speedier and
more efficient.
According to Clyde Buchanan,
assistant director of the pharmacy,
the new system will work like this:
An outpatient or an employee who
wishes to have a prescription filled at
Duke will present that prescription to
a clerk at the pharmacy in-window.
The clerk will immediately
determine the cost of the drugs,
inform the patient and then pass the
prescription along to one of the
department’s registered pharmacists.
The patient will then pay for the
medications, and the clerk will assign
him a number from one to 99,
depending on the number given to
the patient who immediately
preceeded him.
Depending on the volume of
business, a wait of up to 20 or 30
minutes may follow, and the patient is
free to take a seat in the waiting room
or carry out other business in the
hospital.
When the prescription is ready, the
assigned number appears on a device
known as a “visable digital call
system” which is easy to see from the
chairs in the waiting room. If the
patient comes back after an hour, for
example, and sees that a number
greater than the one he possesses is
displayed on the call box, he knows
his prescription is waiting to be
picked up.
“Our new system will end the
congestion around the pharmacy
window,” Buchanan said, “and it will
also eliminate the uncertainty in
knowing when a prescription is
ready.
“In addition, being on a first-come,
first-served basis, the system is more
fair to the patient,” he said.
“Within the department, it’s more
efficient in that prescriptions flow
more directly to and from those who
prepare them, and hence the time
required to get them filled should be
reduced.”
Buchanan said that there would be
no increase in cost to patients and
employees, because there will be no
increase in pharmacy staff.
Edgar L. Riggsbee, pharmacy
supervisor, said that some
prescriptions are particularly
(Cotitinued on page -f)
retinitis pigmentosa, a disease
characterized by a progressive
deterioration of the retina, the
innermost layer of “sight cells” within
the eye.
Over the course of years, a person
suffering from the condition
experiences a narrowing of the field
of vision and either night or daytime
blindness. Eye specialists understand
some of the mechanism of what
happens during retinitis pigmentosa,
but as yet there is little they can do to
arrest it and nothing they can do to
reverse its course.
The disease is considered
hereditary by ophthalmologists, and
although neither of her parents were
affected by it, both Mrs. Buckner’s
brother and sister are also blind.
“My husband Carl and I have been
keeping close check on our son
Steven, and he has his eyes checked
every six months,” she said.
“Everytime we have to go, I hold my
breath and pray.”
Mrs. Boring explained that her
blindness was the result of scarring
on her cornea as an infant. Ulcers
which didn’t heal properly left
opaque tissue in front of her lenses
like a blindfold. Other eye
complications prevented specialists
(Continued on page 4)
CONSULTING A TOOL OF HER TRADE — Rebecca Buckner
prepares to type information for the permanent files of the
medical rf.nords division using a medical speller written in
Braille, the special "dot writii^' for blind people. (Photo by
David Williamwn)