Business profile

Your business profile can be viewed in a number of different ways, all of which will help you to decide the most appropriate way to staff the pharmacy. We often make assumptions about the staffing profiles we need without understanding our business sufficiently.

We often fail to separate the tasks that we must react to from the tasks we can manage. For example, we think about dispensing in general, rather than the dispensing we must react to (walk in prescriptions) and the dispensing we can proactively organise (collected prescriptions).

Consider these reactive tasks:

• Walk in prescriptions €“ Monitor how many prescriptions are brought in by patients for immediate dispensing (i.e. waiting or calling back within a few hours). Plot the number of prescriptions per hour.
• Retail sales €“ Monitor the sales made and plot these as sales per hour during the day.

Compare these with your staffing profiles for the dispensary and the retail counters. Do they follow the same profiles? Do you have more staff when you are busy and less staff when you are quiet? Do you have the right staff at the right times? Is your customer drive profiling correct for your store?

Proactive tasks are things you can manage when you do them (e.g. dispensing collected prescriptions, stock management, administration, cleaning, date checking, etc). Identify how long these activities normally take.

Skill mix profile

Understanding the workload you have in the pharmacy is the first step to managing your staff costs. The second step is to look at how effectively the pharmacy team manages that workload.