Case study 3: implementing gold standards

What happened?

GPhC inspections came into force with the new pharmacy contract in 2014. Pharmacies need to maintain certain standards within their pharmacy, but pharmacies were struggling to monitor the different aspects of compliance at this time. They were struggling and having to deal with this alone.

MBA principles applied:

• Operational management €“ overseeing, designing and controlling processes
• Managing organisational behaviour €“ how groups and individuals perform.

What we did:

We held a stakeholder meeting with operations teams, superintendent offices and pharmacists. We worked jointly to understand the aspects of pharmacy operations that were being monitored and the desired levels of compliance. We built these standards into an internal quarterly audit checklist that could be used by external auditors, area managers, etc, and would allow a detailed check followed by feedback where compliance was lacking.

Pharmacists were now able to be supported to achieve the standards. The process of maintaining standards was built into daily, weekly and monthly actions that were shared between more members of the pharmacy team with support from outside the pharmacy.