Opportunities are external to your business. The only control you have over these things is to decide whether you want to engage with them or not. 

People often think of opportunities from the perspective of their current business; what could we do now? This is faulty thinking as it imposes barriers and limits to initial thinking that prevents us achieving effectively. A different approach might be to ask the questions from the following points of view:

• If I were starting with a blank sheet of paper what could my business look like?

• If time and money were not an issue, what would our opportunities be?

You might consider services to be your biggest opportunity. Faulty thinking in terms of looking for the opportunity would be to ask what you think your capacity is for delivering different services. More productive thinking would involve asking, what is the size of the market?

In simple terms, you could identify the number of prescriptions for the contraceptive pill that you dispense. If you estimate that you could provide 60 per cent of these prescriptions through the Pharmacy Contraceptive Service (as a conservative estimate), you have started to quantify the opportunity for that service. You could perform a similar exercise with prescriptions for UTIs or earache to quantify part of the opportunity for the Pharmacy First service.

The opportunity for NMS could be quantified by applying the Community Pharmacy England statistics to your dispensing volume.

The opportunity for the Hypertension Case-finding Service could be quantified by looking at the performance of similar pharmacies. These pharmacies will have a spread of performance from zero to the best performer. Aiming for the average is limiting as this will be dragged down by those who don’t provide the service whilst aiming to be the best performer may be unachievable and unrealistic. Aiming to be in the top 10 per cent may be a better measure for many pharmacies.

Threats

Threats are also external. We have no control over these things but we can take actions to mitigate these threats.

Some of the threats that you might look at include:

• Competition: Competition from other local pharmacies is probably our first thought. Competition from distance selling pharmacies for dispensing services will limit our ability to deliver services as it will reduce our access to patients. Competition from other healthcare professionals should also be a consideration. How might a service be provided in GP practices by pharmacists, nurses, or paramedics?

• Lack of collaboration: This is mentioned as a potential weakness from the perspective of the approach in your pharmacy. It becomes a threat when considered from the perspective of other pharmacies or GPs.

• Mistrust by other professionals: Do GP practices trust pharmacies to deliver services effectively? Do they have experience of referring patients who don’t then receive the service?

• Patient knowledge: A low level of patient knowledge about the services provided is a threat to the success of your business.

Pause to reflect

Quantify your absolute potential for delivering the following service:

• Pharmacy Contraceptive Service

• Pharmacy First UTI Service

• New Medicine Service

• Hypertension Case-finding Service.

Don’t limit your potential by what you think you can achieve, but by the size of the market.