Monday, July 09, 2007

Practice leaflet

We’ve had the first draft of our practice leaflet back from the NPA and it looks really good. We are now turning our attention to pushing our collection and delivery service again.

We have revamped our PIL and are going to try to get it to look the same as the practice leaflet. In the meantime, I’m trying to find the time to start our annual patient survey.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello Dee,

I have been reading your blogs regularly, and feel it's time again to write in the comments section. :)

You said you want to focus on collection and delivery service. That is what I want to do in our chain of pharmacies, cos you know what.... the big Wal-Mart Asda in town have applied for a 100 hour pharmacy :p.

We want to offer a better service to our customers than our competitors. How do you know when to give a delivery service and to whom? If everyone wanted a delivery service than how/why will people come into the pharmacies? Do we make a charge when the pharmacy half way between us and town centre are offering a free delivery service to anyone that asks for it (bearing in mind they do 12000 items a month which should cover their costs)?

We offer a delivery service at the moment, but we do not advertise it whereas this other pharmacy does. I'm quite confused by the logistics of all this, I wonder if the NPA/Nucare have any guidance on this.

Also, how have your CD SOPs turned out? We had our RPSGB inspections in late May and June time at all our 5 pharmacies and they turned out very well... the only thing the inspector pointed was having an SOP for CD deliveries... which we were doing right anyway, but it was not written down.

Just had a really stupid customer coming in today regarding Hayfever Scheme and I'm still quite peeved off. :( The pharmacist in charge was trying to help her and all she was doing was complaining to other customers who were in the shop that we are stupid and always give bad service blah blah... And you know what.... she turned up at 4:15pm. We close at 4pm on Saturdays, and put the sign "CLOSED" on our door. However, because we don't turn our customers away at weekends (more money in our pockets and more satisfied customers), I didn't refuse to serve anyone... This woman was ungrateful, rude, and darn right nuisaince! :( Her making a scene doesn't look good on us does it?

I'm speaking to the Boss/Super-Intendant (my papa) and wondering if it's really worth putting a polite notice up in all our pharmacies about no swearing or abuse (like they do in medical pratices).

Anyway enough of my ranting, hope all is well in your pharmacy. Take care.

Sachin

8:19 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Sachin – pleased you are enjoying the blog. In terms of your comments:

I’m nowhere near finishing our SOP on CDs. I’ve got as far as reading the DH guidance to see what is needed and that’s about it. As soon as I settle down to do it something else seems to get thrown in the way.

In terms of policing our delivery service, we seem to do three things in the pharmacy which makes it run fairly smoothly. We:
• Charge a nominal charge if a patient requires more than one delivery a week.
• We don’t guarantee a delivery time and just say between ‘4-6pm’ for example. This isn’t a problem for the truly housebound patients, but we find that the more mobile patients prefer to collect their prescriptions rather than wait round for a delivery (since we won’t push it through the letter box or deliver it to a neighbour!!).
• If we think someone is trying it on then we will ask them again if there is no way that the script can be collected since their delivery will take up a slot that may be needed by a vulnerable housebound person.
We have always openly advertised this service and deliver between 9-11am and 4-6pm so it does take up quite a bit of staff time.

Hope that helps.
Dee

10:30 am  

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