How to review your dispensing process

Susan has just taken over a busy pharmacy in the heart of a village. There is another pharmacy on the other side of the village.

One of the first things that she has noticed is that, while the process in the dispensary is very efficient, it has evolved into a production line – with the pharmacist in the dispensary. Susan doesn’t want to reduce the efficiency of the dispensing process, but she feels that it could be re-engineered to provide more value to the patients.

She wants to be much more involved with the patients who come into the pharmacy, giving them advice and helping them to use their medicines effectively, rather than just providing them with the products that their GPs have prescribed. Susan reviews all the staff she employs and identifies those who she believes could take a bigger role. She plans a new process that keeps her on the pharmacy counter and delegates the dispensing process to the technicians and dispensers.

At the regular team meeting, she announces her vision for the new way of working and outlines her plans. She asks for input from members of the team and asks them to help her write the new SOPs that will guide how exactly the process will work. Susan then approaches a couple of members of the pharmacy team and asks them to become ACTs.

Working together as a team, they redesign the SOPs, undertake training, where necessary, and even reorganise the dispensary layout to make the workflow more efficient with the new processes. Susan is then able to hand out the majority of prescriptions herself and give advice to those patients who need it.