Let's think about your training needs and how they relate to two areas of your pharmacy business:

• Your current business performance
• Future changes.

Consider the following questions carefully €“ these are all worthy of consideration in the context of improving your business performance through training:

• What do I and my staff need in terms of training in order to do the job better or in a different way?
• How do I address gaps in current performance and still anticipate future needs?
• Am I using the skills of the staff in the most efficient manner?
• Will multi-skilling or redistributing responsibilities help the pharmacy run more effectively?
• Could our staff take on more responsibility in the business or help coach and mentor a junior or less experienced member of staff?

You will probably have a wide range of performance information about your business and your people. Examples may be:

• Overall sales turnover figures
• Appraisal or performance review data
• Job descriptions
• Staff turnover information
• Certificates of completion of specified levels of training €“ such as NVQs or similar
• Data on time taken to perform a particular task or carry out a particular service
• Data on waiting times for prescriptions
• Results of various audits 
• Customer feedback through patient surveys.

Having access to relevant, accurate and timely performance data may sound obvious, but such information may not be in an accessible or usable format. An early task, therefore, is to identify the data which may be helpful, to check if this data is easily available to you and to set up systems for collecting it if required.