What gets measured gets done! The question is, what should you measure and why?

Your measures should always reflect your goals. You will have come across SMART objectives and this is where they come into their own. Ensuring your measures are Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound means that you can break down your goals into smaller milestones.

For example, you may have a goal to increase your service revenue compared to NHS prescription revenue. This is not yet SMART, so you could further define this goal as: ‘Increase service revenue so that it becomes 20 per cent of total revenue by the end of 2017/18’.

This larger goal can then be further broken down into a series of smaller objectives concerning individual services, eg, delivering 400 high-quality MURs per year or establishing two new commissioned services by 2017/18.

Care should be given to think about any inter-dependent metrics or measures which might drive the wrong behaviours; you may also want to look at quality of outcomes, profitability and patient experience feedback as part of your suite of metrics to ensure delivery is not just about the numbers.

Measures are there to drive the right behaviours from all involved, monitor progress against your goals, and support change. Your business metrics must be aligned to your plan and critical success factors. Before getting started on your future measures, it can be helpful to consider what you currently collect data on and what you use as measures for your business.

Pharmacies frequently measure volume of prescriptions and gross OTC turnover, but may not look at trends or benchmark against the market or the needs of your community or commissioners. Metrics for private and commissioned services, where measured at all, are often based on activity or gross revenue, but not on profitability or their contribution to the business. The Pareto principle often applies, with 80 per cent of profit coming from 20 per cent of activity or products.