Yogesh Patel is a pharmacist and the director of seven hugely successful pharmacies across the Bucks and London area. He employs 52 members of staff, with dispensing from his flagship branch in Teddington alone accounting for around 11,000 prescription items each month. As well as juggling a popular travel clinic and high patient demand for an impressively large range of NHS and private clinical services.
Like many high street pharmacies across the country, Yogesh and his team are incredibly dedicated in their efforts to keep the communities they serve healthy. But he admits the long hours, pressure and the demands placed upon frontline teams can take their toll.
“There’s no such thing as a typical day in pharmacy anymore. The only real given is that it will be busy,” says Yogesh.
“For a pharmacist, perhaps 70% of their day needs to be involved in checking dispensed prescriptions. And while a few years ago a pharmacist would have focused time to do this, the demands on them and on the team have changed. Distractions happen – a patient who needs urgent advice or a last-minute appointment being booked. It can often feel like you’re being pulled in every direction.
“In any business, when the pressure and demand become overwhelming, it becomes harder to maintain staff wellbeing and ultimately, retain good people. And that worries me. I have a brilliant group of people working with me. I want them to be happy and healthy at work, not burned out and miserable.”
And Yogesh isn’t alone in his concerns about the impact of increased pressure on community pharmacy.
According to the latest CPE Pharmacy Pressures Survey 92% of pharmacy staff say they’re not coping well because of workload. And wellbeing of staff is now ranked by pharmacy owners as one of the most serious fears they have about their business.
But fortunately for Yogesh and his team at Herbert and Shrive Pharmacy, Cegedim Rx had a few tech tricks up their sleeves to ease some of the pharmacy’s pain points – starting with helping to relieve the burden of manual prescription item accuracy checking.
Yogesh has been a customer of Cegedim Rx since 2002 with the PMR system Pharmacy Manager a mainstay within his business.
“Pharmacies need to embrace technology,” Yogesh adds. “Teams can’t just keep doing more dispensing, more services, more NHS and private work. I needed to do something to better support the team. I just didn’t know what or where to start. “Cegedim Rx suggested I try out the new Pharmacy Manager Accuracy Check module. It was already part of my package so there was no extra cost, and it could be switched on without me or the team having to do anything. There wasn’t much to lose.”
Yogesh trialled Accuracy Check initially at his Teddington branch.
“It’s one of our busiest pharmacies for dispensing so I wanted to really test the module out, plus I’m based there so it helped me keep a close eye on things,” he said.
Accuracy Check is a module within Pharmacy Manager designed to reduce dispensing errors by introducing a scan-driven verification process.
Removing the need for manual dispensing checks, the functionality ensures that the items picked match the prescription being dispensed and the correct labels have been attached.
“It’s literally changed the way we work” says Yogesh. “Our dispensing errors are pretty much zero now and it feels like a great weight has been lifted off the team.
“We’re humans, we’re not machines. We can have a bad day. We can lose concentration. We can make a mistake, and sometimes just the worry about that can double the stress levels in pharmacy. The beauty of using Accuracy Check is that it’s consistent, it takes some of the pressure away and honestly, it was so easy and painless to start using.”
Testament to the impact the module has had, Yogesh has now switched on Accuracy Check
across all seven branches.
“I get why some pharmacies are reluctant to change and try new things, especially when it
comes to dispensing and to technology. I was too. But it’s been accurate from day one and
everything works seamlessly together.”