Include the patient’s perspective in your business decisions

After reading this module, you will be able to:
•    Understand why perspective is a key driver for business success 
•    Be able to explain why you do what you do – i.e. your purpose
•    Define what ‘good business’ means for your pharmacy 
•    Prioritise the needs of patients in designing your business operations
•    Make the most of opportunities for efficiency
•    Understand how to proactively sell your pharmacy’s services to customers in a successful way.

Community pharmacy is many things – an NHS pillar, the home of medicines experts on the high street, and more. But fundamentally, it is a service industry driven by the needs of patients. Pharmacies that serve their patients do well, and pharmacies that are doing well will find it easier to serve their patients.

With pharmacies battling rising overheads and plummeting medicines margins, it is easy to define good business in terms of the cashflow figures on a balance sheet. Some might think that ‘being busy’ is what counts as good business (perhaps less so in these times of strained capacity). 

The problem with these perspectives is that they are too narrow and taken solely from our point of view. We need to remember that our patients and customers will see good business from a different point of view. 

Patients have choice. The majority are not limited to only a single pharmacy for the services they want. If they cannot get what they want from your pharmacy, they will go somewhere else. 

If we are training patients to only have limited expectations of the service we provide then we open the door to distance selling pharmacies for even more competition. 

Business owners want their businesses to: 

• Deliver a consistent service 

• Have processes running efficiently 

• Be staffed appropriately 

• Have team members with appropriate skills 

• Manage stock effectively 

• Deliver good customer service.

If we approach this with the wrong perspective, we may create a short-term benefit to the business, but it might have a negative impact in the longer-term. 

Business owners want a consistent service that is easy to manage; patients want a consistent service that is flexible enough to meet their needs. For example, businesses want to reduce their stock holding and create a ‘just in time’ approach to reduce costs; patients want their items in stock when they need them. 

Good business must start from the perspective of the customer. If we do not get this right, our business cannot be good from other points of view in the long-term.