Are you doing the full quota of Medicine Use Reviews? Every pharmacy in England has a quota of 400, representing up to £11,200 of income. Finance is the wrong reason to be doing MURs, but this funding does enable pharmacy to offer a very useful NHS service that directly impacts on medicines optimisation and patient care.

I certainly get a huge amount of personal and professional satisfaction from having conversations with patients, making sure they understand why they’re taking their medicines, when to take them and how it will make a difference to their lives. My driver is this professional satisfaction, but knowing that I’m being paid for this time with patients in the consultation room is a win-win situation. I’m also aware of the savings that can be made within the CCG and local surgeries when medicines are used properly.

It took us a while to get used to the new medicines service (NMS), and we set up new processes to enable the team to work together to deliver this efficiently. Initially there were problems, but we worked through them.

Research has demonstrated that NMS reviews are beneficial to the NHS and to patients. The average pharmacy has a potential income of over £11,000 from NMS, so this must be something to build into your strategy to benefit the NHS, your patients and your business.

Is prescription volume for your pharmacy keeping pace with national and local prescription growth? We get paid through an averaging system, so it is important to see how we compare to everybody else. We use Check34 (free through the NPA) to benchmark how the pharmacy is performing and to ensure that we’re being paid properly (more in ‘Cost reduction’ later).

Services are often talked about in a negative way. However, most healthy living pharmacies which have focused on the delivery of services would agree that pharmacy services are very beneficial to patients, and to the business. These can be private (weight loss clinics, travel clinics etc), as well as NHS services, thus expanding the impact the pharmacy has on patient care and reducing the pharmacy’s financial reliance on external forces.

To many pharmacies, over the counter sales do not appear to be important but, depending on your business strategy, this could become an essential area. Community pharmacy has the trust of its customers and has footfall. There are many areas of customer need not properly supported that we can build on: from young mothers with babies through to the elderly populations we serve.

Most patients come first to the local community pharmacy for advice and initial products, but ideally we want to encourage them to come back. How can you develop this area? OTC sales are generally regarded as more profitable than prescription business - how do you make this a success in your strategy?