Mail delays impacting medicine deliveries
For days, Tiffany Agnew kept checking and checking her U.S. Postal Service tracking number. Her antidepressant medication had been expected to be delivered Jan. 15 and hadn’t come in the mail yet.
She first attributed the delay to the hard freeze that swept the area. But then she noticed her package still wasn’t moving. It was one of numerous packages caught up in the recent USPS mail delays.
Agnew had been without her medication once recently after she and her family moved to Conroe from Colorado last August and before she was able to get a new prescription from a Texas doctor.
“It wasn’t good,” Agnew said last week when she was down to just one dose left. “You have side effects when you don’t get your medications. It was really hard for me and my husband for a little while there until I could get it. The impact of not having my medication is severe for me.”
Agnew ended up getting her medication in the mail a few days later. But she wasn’t the only one to watch their medication stuck in transit as USPS delays swept across the region in recent weeks.
Many people have watched the tracking progress of their packages, whether it be bills or birthday gifts or online purchases, stall at facilities in Missouri City and North Houston as issues including poor planning caused significant backlog in the area.
The tension has been especially palpable for people waiting on important medicine to finally reach their homes.
“I think that many people don’t think about the impact that the Postal Service, the UPS, FedEx, what their shipment performance really means to our health,” said Dr. James Langabeer, a professor and quality and outcomes researcher at UTHealth Houston.
Langabeer said for the most part, delivery delays weren’t an issue for patients previously as pharmacies don’t get their medications through mail carriers. But the convenience of at-home delivery and the potential savings of bulk supply orders — which Langabeer added aren’t as cost-efficient as one might expect — led to the rise of mail orders.
Langabeer warns that relying on the postal service, and other carriers, for medication is a risk. What’s happening in Houston is an example of the negative side of the risk.
For those who discover their medicine has been lost in the mail or is stuck in transit, Langabeer recommends being proactive and contacting the provider that sends the medication.
People can also request a second prescription for a smaller quantity of medication to hold them over for a week. But he said that can be dicey due to “regulatory pressures on physicians not to write multiple scripts for the same purpose.”
“You have to plan ahead,” Langabeer said. “You’ve got to try to get the prescription sent off and started with a little bit of lead time and build in a couple of extra days.”
Langabeer recommends that people buy their medications locally. Then, he said, the customer will be in control of their medication and not the postal service.
The Kelsey-Seybold Clinic also recommended patients pick up their medication in person instead of shipping them due to the mail delays.
Some others have opted for a different option.
Hempstead resident Stacy Griffith had a bevy of packages delayed when it came time for her to reorder her medicine earlier this month. She elected to have it shipped with a non-USPS carrier.
“Our medications, when I ordered them in January through our Express Mail Pharmacy, I chose the $14 shipping option so they came by a carrier besides USPS,” Griffith said. “We can’t afford for my husband’s insulin to come late.”