Pharmacy Complete

Pharmacy consultancy

Deborah Evans

Saving lives

A patient came into the pharmacy to thank me. Nothing unusual in that although infrequent, our customers are generally very grateful for the support we give them across a range of issues – their medicines, general health and wellbeing. On this occasion though, the thank you will be remembered for the rest of my career. The gentleman came in specifically to thank me for saving his father’s life.

I remembered him clearly – he had come in on a Saturday morning wanting to speak to the pharmacist. He was in a quandary – he was concerned about his 84 year old father, who had developed cellulitis and despite being on antibiotics, wan’t improving. An hour and a half away, the son was managing the issue remotely and was being fobbed off by his dad who didn’t want to leave his caring role for his wife with dementia. A familiar story. Many questions later, I was concerned. This could likely deteriorate into either a sepsis or acute kidney injury. I advised strongly for him to call 111, not to leave it, not to feel ’embarrassed’ about ‘making a fuss’ (his words) and get to see his dad as soon as he could. He committed to this action and left.

So what happened? He came in to tell me that he followed my direction; 111 immediately called out an ambulance and his dad was admitted into hospital. Despite IV antibiotics he developed a sepsis three days later and was put into intensive care. They almost lost him but I’m pleased to say he survived and at the point of discussion, was in a ward and eager to get home and back to his wife.

What made me have this insight? The same situation played out with my late mother several years earlier. I had recently undertaken some CPD on Sepsis and I’m passionate about reducing the risk of AKI. More so, I asked questions. And listened. Aside from the intellectual assessment, I followed my instinct.

Stories like this will be happening up and down the Country. Community pharmacists and their teams make a real difference. And sometimes we save lives.

The importance of numbers

It’s been quite a week. Like many small businesses, we frequently find ourselves responding in the moment, juggling many balls in an attempt to doing everything we can, to be flexible to our customer’s needs. At best this is exciting, stimulating and challenging in equal measure. At worst, we are firefighting and hoping (with everything crossed) that what we do will make us some profit to keep going. Sound familiar?

We meet many independent pharmacy contractors who are caught in that difficult place – so busy delivering against an ever-increasing workload, putting out huge blazes as more and more challenges face the business and with the uncertainty that any of it is making enough money to even pay the bills. These are tough times and for all that hard work there really is no guarantee that it will sustain the business. Feeling out of control and unable to do everything we want to, leads to stress.

Stress in good measure is productive but too much leads to the wrong behaviours, reacting in the moment outside of core strategy and short-term thinking. Furthermore it can lead to ill-health and disease.

We have found ourselves in that place this year. We have worked incredibly hard to deliver for our customers on their Healthy Living Pharmacy (HLP) requirements and this has been enormously rewarding for us as founders of the concept. We have recently won an award for it and we love what we do. But does it pay the bills?

Two days last week to review our strategy for 2018/19 were the best (and hardest) two days spent this year – looking at our business rather than being in it. What we quickly realised was that we have been so busy doing what we know is the right thing that we had lost sight of some of the key drivers, and if continued won’t pay the bills. We had got sucked into the very behaviours that we encourage our clients to avoid. Reacting in the moment, working on projects that will make a difference but for free.

So we have had a serious look at our priorities. Knowing where we are going and having specific metrics in place will be critical to our continued success. We have followed exactly our Planning for Growth planning process and now have a tight plan, with key performance indicators and a dashboard for regular monthly review. This will enable us to work smarter, focus on the things that we not only love but can also sustain the business and feel more in control. We know we will need to check-in frequently to make sure we’re not slipping into being more reactive. We will continue to do stuff that makes a difference in the profession because it’s the right thing. That won’t change, but it’s about applying a little more discipline, business structure and asking the question “why am I doing this’?

This stuff really works.