Pharmacy is one of the more numerate health professions, but few of us use figures routinely to help improve our management and controls or to help us react when things are changing. There is a great deal of national information available on prescribing practice, but when asked how many prescriptions we specifically dispense each day, how long it takes to dispense them or how many prescriptions can one pharmacist safely dispense, the answer is probably 'it varies'.

A suggestion would be to use some of the information you have to hand, or could collect relatively easily, to look at how your pharmacy compares to others or how your performance is matching your and your local area's goals and expections.

Useful NHS statistics

The NHS information centre website www.ic.nhs.uk provides access to a wide variety of pharmacy statistics that may help you to benchmark your performance. Some information is available for the previous nine years, allowing for trends to be determined.

There is a lot of information available that you can benchmark your own data against. For example, statistics available from the General Pharmaceutical Services in England 2000-01 to 2009-10 covered the range of contracted services and showed that: 

• In 2009-10, a total of 10,691 English pharmacies dispensed 813.3 million prescriptions (average 78,458) at an average cost of £9.16 each
• The range in prescriptions per pharmacy in different PCTs ranges from 2,590 per month (in Westminster, London) to 11,845 (in Redcar and Cleveland)
• There were 535 100-hour pharmacies, 76 internet or mail-order pharmacies and three one-stop primary care centres in 2010
• The ratio of multiples to independents is 61.6 to 38.4 nationally, but in London the ratio is reversed at 37.5 and 62.5
• The highest numbers of medicines use reviews per pharmacy were 278 in City and Hackney, London
• The number of pharmacies per 100,000 population ranges from 15 in Wiltshire and several other areas to 39 in Westminster
• The number of prescriptions per 100,000 population ranges from 1,461 (in Hampshire) to 143 (in Kensington and Chelsea, London)
• The net ingredient cost of all prescriptions dispensed increased by 3.5 per cent (£295.0 million) in 2009 to £8,834.4 million; an increase of 58.2 per cent on that in 2000 
• A total of 926.7 million prescription items were dispensed in 2010, an increase of 4.6 per cent (40.7 million items) from 2009 and 67.9 per cent from 2000. 

While some of this information may only be of passing interest to you, some may get you thinking about how your pharmacy compares.

Your own statistics

The fact that six million people a day visit a pharmacy is often quoted, but do you know how many people visit your premises? This information may help in supporting the case for wider public health roles.

Francis Bacon said 'Knowledge is power', and pharmacists need to know as much as
possible about the influencers of their outputs and inputs for work or business and use that information to plan ahead. Information can also be useful in supporting the retention of services if they are under threat, or in developing and pitching for new services.

Prioritise your effort in collecting information for the least additional work. A stepwise process is suggested:

Step 1. What activities are the main consumers of your resources and which generate most income, profit or patient benefit?

Step 2. Identify the information you are already collecting about these areas, such as:

• NHS prescriptions dispensed monthly (or labels produced)
• Controlled drug (CD) prescriptions dispensed monthly
• Methadone supervision
• Patient medication record (PMR) figures
• MUR numbers.

Step 3. Identify other information that may be useful to have if you have or can devise easy ways of counting it, such as:

• Customer footfall
• Counter takings
• Staff levels.

Step 4. Identify any quality indicators, for
example:

• Complaints
• Errors.

You can set up a spreadsheet or database for the main factors and decide how you can most easily obtain the information you need.

This may come from direct counts, indirect counts, estimates or sampling. For example, you will know how many prescriptions have been dispensed monthly from your prescription returns, you may be collecting information on prescriptions dispensed each day and you can also get an indirect count from a computer labeller. You can determine when during the day is busiest by identifying the number of collection items dispensed each hour through sampling.

Once collected, you can use your information to help quantify your activity and even to inform your management decisions.