How to improve the services your community pharmacy offers

There are three key ways to improve the services your community pharmacy offers. Firstly, you can offer more services that meet your customers’ needs. Secondly, you can devise strategies that free up staff time, meaning they can work smarter and more productively. Thirdly, you can invest in technology that allows you to deliver more for less.

All three of these approaches allow you to offer customers more, benefit from major time and cost savings and increase your margins. When combined with savvy marketing, you can also attract new customers and sell more to existing ones.

In this blog, we share some of the main ways today’s pharmacies are succeeding at delivering better, more efficient and more profitable services. 

Consider offering more services

The more services your community pharmacy offers, the more ways you can help new and existing patients while increasing your underlying profits. The key question is which services to branch out into.

As a starting point, there are many additional services that have proved popular among pharmacies. In recent years, many have opted to provide one or more of the eight Advanced Services within the NHS Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF).

These are:

• Community Pharmacist Consultation Service
• Flu Vaccination Service
• Hepatitis C Testing Service
• Hypertension Case-finding Service
• New Medicine Service
• Smoking Cessation Service
• Appliance Use Review
• Stoma Appliance Customisation
  
  

In addition, some pharmacies also offer ‘enhanced services’, such as anticoagulation monitoring, not to mention the 1,500+ pharmacies that have provided a COVID-19 vaccination service. 

Before launching a new service, it’s a good idea to consult with customers to find out what types of extra provision would help them most. You could do this by simply asking customers to fill in a short questionnaire while they’re waiting for their prescriptions. 

If you can match new services to the needs of your existing customers, you’ll be taking another step towards making your pharmacy a better community resource.

Deliver a compelling patient experience with the help of the right PMR system
 Elevate the services your community pharmacy offers by choosing the right PMR provider.

Free up more of your pharmacists’ time

You’ll know from experience that a  key barrier to community pharmacies offering more services is the fact that many pharmacists are already overstretched. A major part of the problem is that pharmacists spend significant amounts of time on routine tasks such as prescription checking. If you can find ways of safely freeing up more of their time, they can then use it to improve the services your pharmacy offers. 

Fortunately, there are many ways a community pharmacy can ease the burden on their pharmacists’ time. For example, the following ideas have been successfully put into practice by UK pharmacies:

• Automated dispensing processes. Some PMR software packages allow you to automate and speed up dispensing. For example, you can conduct instant electronic clinical checks, meaning pharmacists don’t spend lots of time doing these manually. Features such as one-click Summary Care Record Integration and Real Time Exemption Checking also speed up the dispensing process significantly. It’s worth checking to see whether your software offers these features and, if it does, making full use of them. If your current PMR system doesn’t help you automate dispensing, you should consider changing providers.
• ‘Hub and spoke’ dispensing. This model allows prescriptions to be assembled using automated processes in a ‘hub’ pharmacy. This allows staff in ‘spoke’ pharmacies to devote more time to patient care. Although the ‘hub and spoke’ model is currently only open to businesses that have their own hub, the Department of Health & Social Care recently conducted a consultation on allowing ‘hub’ pharmacies to offer services to third-party ‘spoke’ pharmacies. If the proposals go ahead, it could help free up staff time in many more community pharmacies in general and in small, independent ones in particular.
• Invest in pharmacy robotic dispensing systems. Technological advances mean that most of the dispensing process can be handled by specialised robots that automate the picking and packing process. When you use a typical system, staff will process the prescription label and then the robot will find the correct medication, scan it and check it, then deliver it to the pharmacist. These robots can dispense hundreds or even thousands of items per hour and can also operate outside of normal pharmacy hours. However, these systems are not cheap, putting them out of the reach of many smaller pharmacies. However, as the next point shows, there are less expensive ways of speeding up the dispensing process.

The key takeaway here is that the more you can streamline the dispensing process, the quicker customers get their prescriptions and the more time pharmacists can devote to delivering other services. This is a major factor for increasing customer retention: research in 2017 found that 70% of people regard face-to-face advice from a pharmacist or other pharmacy professional as very important to them. Speeding up dispensing allows a pharmacist to deliver a much more personal service.

Boost your pharmacy's revenue with our PMR guide
A change in your PMR provider could be the catalyst to boost your pharmacy’s efficiency and productivity.

Boost your marketing and communications

If you haven’t reviewed your marketing and communications strategy recently, it’s a good opportunity to do so when you start offering new services. 

Ask yourself where you can make information more readily accessible in the pharmacy itself. Traditional collateral such as posters, leaflets and banners can be effective as long as you change them regularly to maintain interest. Alternatively, you could install new-generation advertising screens such as Pharmacy Display. These allow you to create captivating content to promote products and services to your customers. You can modify your campaigns day-to-day, tailoring your promoted services to customer needs and interests, and you can even use the displays to generate advertising revenue.

Futureproof your PMR system

The more services your community pharmacy offers, the more you’ll demand from your PMR software. That’s why it’s a good idea to make sure your systems are able to deliver the functionality you need. 

For example, if you provide the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service, does your PMR software allow you to streamline consultations and help make sure you’re not losing out on revenue? Advanced PMR systems will notify you automatically if a patient has been referred to you after calling 111, giving you a certain timeframe to action the referral. 

Without a system like this, there’s a danger you won’t realise that patients have been referred to you – and you won’t get paid for it. 

Similarly, modern PMR systems integrate stock and order management functionality. They can show you which ‘often owed’ items are frequently unavailable for patients, helping you to boost those stock levels and provide a better patient experience.You’ll also benefit from instant insight into dead stock, low stock and excess stock.  

Given that the value of stock is the biggest ongoing cost for any pharmacy, better visibility will also boost your budget as well as the quality of your customer service. 

While many pharmacies are understandably wary of changing their PMR systems, having the right software is a key requirement of delivering improved services. To help you get the process right and match the right software to the services you want to offer, we’ve created a free downloadable guide, How to change PMR provider.