Carry out the activity in this section and review your list of team activities against these criteria:

• Essentiality – How essential is this task? Is it important to the running of the business (e.g. ordering stock, endorsing prescriptions, providing MURs and the NMS, serving customers or recording near misses)?
• Appropriateness – Who should be performing this task and what skill level is required? Are your team members fully trained to undertake the roles they deliver? Are you getting the best productivity from them? Is more training needed in your pharmacy? Remember that when things go wrong, it is often systems that are at fault rather than individuals.
• Efficiency – Once you have established key roles for your staff, are there better ways of doing things? Can you lift a piece of paper only once and deal with it? Are all of the essential items to hand? Is all of the stock in the dispensary easy to find and prioritised for fast-moving lines, if that is appropriate? Can you improve your procedures to handle recurring activities and queries? What can the staff deal with rather than me? How can we use technology better? How can we improve the dispensing near-miss rate?
• Quality – Quality is reliable, dependable and consistent. Focus on getting quality and reliability into the system and efficiencies will also follow. There will be fewer dispensing errors, better quality of data in the PMR and fewer incidences of double dispensing.

Just thinking about the above may already have given you a clearer view of the systems you need to change and whether more can be delegated across the pharmacy team.