The first step in building your pharmacy around your patients is to understand who your patients are. How well do you know who your patients are? If you were asked to describe your patients, how detailed could you be?

If we treated all our patients in the same way, we might meet the needs of some of them, but we could probably do a lot better for the majority of them. By gaining a good understanding of who does – or could – use our pharmacy, we can tailor the services we provide to different patient groups. We can create a picture of the patients who currently use our pharmacy.

This is a good first step, but if we want to grow our patient base we should also think about the patients who don’t use our pharmacy because we will want to attract these people in the future.

Understanding your current patients

We already have at our disposal the potential information source that will allow us to gain a better understanding of who uses our pharmacy. The Patient Medication Records system is designed to hold a wealth of information to help us understand the context for medication use by individual patients. This data can also be used to provide a population-level view of who uses your pharmacy.

Many PMR systems will provide fields for a patient’s age, sex, disease states and doctor’s surgery, among other information. The data in the PMR system can be converted into management information that will help you make decisions and plan to deliver effective services that meet patient needs.

For example, it could be used to create a segmentation map to examine the age profile of current patients and the diseases they suffer from. This could then be used to identify the best way to meet the needs that these patients have.

If, say, you had a large group of young children with asthma, investing in developing the service you provide for this patient group will improve the outcomes of their treatment, encourage these patients to stay and help to build your reputation, attracting other patients who also suffer from asthma. You should check the robustness of the data in your PMR system.

If this is not complete, the management information may lead you to make poor decisions. When was the last time you audited the data you hold in your PMR? Are you confident that you have captured appropriate data that will help you understand your patients?

If your data is not robust, the first step will be to ensure this data is collected for every patient over a minimum period of two months. This will then give you a resource to understand your patient base and target specific services at appropriate patients in the future.

Identifying potential patients

While understanding our current patient profile will allow us to improve the services we offer them, if we want to grow our business we also need to understand the patients who do not visit our pharmacy. There are a number of resources to help us understand this.

The Association of Public Health Observatories (the APHO) is part of Public Health England. It is responsible for collecting and processing data about health collected from across England. The data is holds is freely available for use.

The APHO provides health profiles. These give an overview of the population for a CCG area, including demographic data (such as age profile, sex and ethnicity), deprivation indices and key health measures. These health profiles can also provide information about wards within an area.

There is also a tool that allows you to obtain data about individual GP practices. This will provide demographic data for the practice, along with deprivation and key health indices for a much more distinct area. An initial comparison between practice data and data from our PMR will identify potential patient groups to whom we are not providing services.

You can also obtain a range of prevalence, clinical and public health data from the health profiles. By examining this data you can identify groups of patients whose needs are not currently being met by the pharmacy.