With a clear purpose, the activities of a business can be focused on meeting customer needs, while providing motivation for key non-customer activities. When the purpose is forgotten or unclear, processes can be designed to make the business easier to run and can reduce quality. 

Of course, every business owner wants to make their processes work for their team, but it’s also important to take a step back and review operations dispassionately. What do you do in your business that has been designed to make things easier to manage, rather than better meet customer needs? 

Using your purpose to guide your decisions helps you to focus business improvement activity. Focusing on meeting patient needs more efficiently, rather than merely being more efficient, will create value for patients and the business. All business activities should be linked to purpose to improve quality and team motivation. 

Improving business efficiency can provide benefits to patients and business alike. Businesses should be looking for opportunities to reduce costs by reducing errors and increasing job satisfaction within the team. But if patients receive the right service first time in an efficient way, they will get added value too. 

An example of this could be to improve efficiency in the dispensing process for repeat prescriptions. This process is often driven reactively by processes in the GP practice and collection times, and is therefore about process efficiency rather than patient value. Redesigning the process can improve the service to patients and give benefits to the business. Patients are more likely to stay loyal to a pharmacy that meets their needs.

Opportunities for efficiency

Developments in recent years like the England-wide roll out of the Electronic Prescription Service (currently being implemented across Wales too) have helped pharmacies increase their efficiency in processing repeats as well as supporting their relationships with patients and GPs. 

Many contractors have explored other opportunities for driving efficiency, such as using a robot or collection kiosk to introduce automation into their working practices, or finding ways to delegate tasks so the pharmacist’s time is not spent checking prescriptions. 

Supervision reforms, potential legislation changes giving pharmacy technicians PGD powers and the Government’s plans to revisit hub and spoke regulations are all potential levers that may be used to free up capacity, although there is a debate to be had on all these topics – particularly the usefulness of hub and spoke dispensing for independents.