You will already have an appreciation of the qualifications and current training being undertaken by your staff. However, to start moving forward with maximising your skill mix, it can be valuable to formally document what tasks get done in your pharmacy and the level of staff needed to do them. You can regard this as a task/competency matrix.

You can do this at either a job role or personal level; a very simple example is shown as a chart below. You will find it helpful to chunk tasks into groups, for example those relating to the dispensing process, those relating to care homes, those relating to over-the-counter medicines and those relating to housekeeping. You can make the table as sophisticated as you like, adding in an extra column for time taken or cost incurred.

Once this is done, you can use it for a range of purposes, such as the basis of calculating staffing levels, supporting GPhC inspections, as an adjunct to a training plan or for costing out a new service. Many pharmacists find this exercise of most value when they involve their full team in the subsequent discussions, take it one step at a time and try not to be too ambitious with the scope of their first review. Remember, the objective is to ensure that the right person is doing the right task and that you are making best use of everyone’s skills and expertise.

Use the finished document in conjunction with appropriate delegation, necessary training and, where appropriate, a review of workflow or operational processes/SOPs. When complete, carefully consider whether all the tasks that you are performing have to be performed by the person or role specified. How might things be done differently?

The steps to take

Pharmacy operates within a constantly changing and challenging environment. Getting the best out of your people and forming them into a high-performing and effective team has never been more important. This article has highlighted the importance of maximising the skills mix in your pharmacy with a brief look at both the NHS and pharmacy context.

We have described a practical model for effective delegation and introduced the concept of formally mapping your skills mix. Taken together these will all be helpful steps in giving you a structure and framework to make best use of your whole staff.

Finally, we have provided a series of questions that you can use with your own team to help define their current stage of development and to help you define what you need to do next to help you and your team move forward to meet today’s challenges.

Do you have an effective team?

Consider how the following questions might apply to your team.What do your answers tell you about how effective your team is and what you might need to do?

• How large is your team? Experience and research suggest that teams operate most effectively with eight to 15 members
• Does your team consist of the right people with the right skills and competencies to do the job well?
• Is there any duplication of effort?
• Are there any gaps that could be filled by further training and development?
• Is there a role for an experienced member of staff to act as a mentor and coach to team members? How might you develop this role and recognise it?
• What about in the future, with impending changes in professional legislation, advances in technology and new models of service commissioning?
• How does the team get feedback on its effectiveness?
• What do your customers, patients and surgeries tell you?
• Does the team have objectives, collectively and individually?
• How is responsibility shared within the team?
• To what extent do team members need to rely on each other to get the job done?
• How do the members of your team know what to expect from one another?
• What is and isn’t OK?
• How is accountability shared within the team?
• How do you know when you are doing a good job as a team?
• What are relationships like within the team?

Based on the answers to these questions you may find it helpful to write down a high-level development plan for your team. Some people find it useful to do this by role, others by individual. The important thing is that you develop a clear plan that relates to and has meaning in your pharmacy.

Further reading

1. Jay, Ros. How to Build a Great Team. The Institute of Management, Prentice Hall 2003
2. Smart JK, Real Delegation: How to Get People to Do Things for You – and Do Them Well, Prentice Hall, 2002
3. Management Pocketbooks, The Self Managed Development Pocketbook, Melrose, 1998
4. Royal College of Nursing. Developing and Sustaining Effective Teams. Can be downloaded as a pdf document from www.rcn.org.uk

 

The next step is to put these ideas into action. Finish by recording your learning outcomes.