The face of community pharmacy is changing, but the income of a typical community pharmacy can broadly be broken down into five main segments:

• Income from OTC medicines and other retail and healthcare products
• Dispensing private prescriptions
• NHS income from additional pharmacy services (such as medicine use reviews in England and Wales and the minor ailment service in Scotland)
• Item fees for dispensing NHS prescriptions
• Purchase profits.

One of the simplest exercises a pharmacy can do is to analyse where income has come from and any trends. This will help you to decide whether your ‘eggs are all in one basket’ or if you need to try to protect and diversify your income streams. Conduct this exercise, perhaps in conjunction with your accountant, on a simple spreadsheet and re-visit it regularly.

Once you’ve made an analysis of where your income comes from you may want to look at accessing or maximising new income streams.