Everyone works hard, but is the quality of service offered by your pharmacy the best it could be? Use these 12 steps to decide if you need to change

Does your team’s practice meet the grade? A pharmacy practice is a system of operations, processes, workflows, people and interactions. Core to this system is the patient and customer. Many organisations operate perfectly acceptable and academic quality programmes, yet fail to deliver quality behaviours.

Many of us may believe that we produce “quality habits”, but how do we know? When do we measure the quality of our offering? How do we know that it is working? How do we identify gaps in our product and/or the service offered by our pharmacy?

In my experience, working with pharmacies and quality, a significant proportion of people believe quality to be a set of standard operating procedures. Clearly a folder of SOPs does not constitute a quality system. Characteristic to this approach are a number of system deficiencies, including:

1. Poor employee involvement in designing and communicating procedures 
2. A lack of internal audit and risk management
3. Poor leadership
4. No clear quality goals and measures
5. Quality issues and corrective actions not recorded
6. Deficient or absent training records
7. No quality system manual or policy
8. Poor control of documents and procedures
9. No planned review period.

A system approach is critical to ensuring that your practice produces continuous improvement and meets the high standards expected of any healthcare practice. A useful technique is to undertake a quality MOT and identify system gaps.