It's time to plan how you delegate in the pharmacy

Freeing up your time isn’t just about delegating tasks, but also empowering colleagues with greater responsibility, says Liam Stapleton, director, Metaphor Development

You can’t do it all yourself. There are a lot of things to do in the pharmacy and not enough time for one person to be responsible for everything. This is becoming more important as we develop into the new model of working in community pharmacies. 

We will remain accountable for everything, but that doesn’t mean we need to be responsible for doing everything. 

For clarity, the buck stops with people who are accountable and only one person can be accountable; but more than one person can be responsible for doing something. 

The way we supervise will need to change from direct to indirect supervision. We need to be able to hand over tasks, confident that they will be done to a high standard. We don’t need to physically oversee everything – which frankly isn’t possible.

Delegation is confidently and effectively handing over responsibility for the completion of a task to trusted team members. While the buck stops with the pharmacist, this can feel a little scary –but with a robust model of delegation it can be achieved with confidence.