Operations

Where the day actually goes in an independent pharmacy

We counted the interruptions for a week. The result was not what the team expected, and it was not the dispensing.

Ask a pharmacy owner where the day goes and you will usually hear "dispensing". Ask the person on the counter and you get a different answer, and it is rarely one thing. It is the accumulation of small interruptions, none of which is worth complaining about on its own.

Between opening and the first proper lull, a counter deals with prescriptions handed in, prescriptions collected, the phone, people asking whether something is ready, people asking where something is, deliveries, the fridge, and the person who just wants to talk to someone. Each one is thirty seconds. None of them is the job. Together they are most of the morning.

The interruption nobody counts

The single most repeated interaction in a community pharmacy is not clinical. It is a variation on "is it ready yet?"

It arrives by phone, at the counter, and increasingly by message. It is asked by people who have already asked once. It is asked because the alternative, from the patient's side, is a wasted trip. That is a completely reasonable thing to want to avoid, which is why no amount of signage stops it.

The question is not the problem. The problem is that answering it requires a person to stop what they are doing and go and look.

Why it compounds

Each interruption has a cost beyond its own thirty seconds, because it lands on someone who was in the middle of something. In a dispensary, being in the middle of something is the point. The interruption is not the thirty seconds. It is the thirty seconds plus getting back to where you were.

• A repeat request arriving by phone has to be written down before it can be actioned
• A collection query requires someone to leave the bench and check the shelf
• A "just wondering about" question at the counter pulls the pharmacist out of a check
• Anything not written down immediately is carried in someone's head until it is

What actually helps

Three things, in order of how much difference they make.

Give the request somewhere to land that is not a person. A repeat that arrives on a channel the patient already uses, and goes straight into a queue, does not need transcribing. The pharmacy sees it when it gets to it, not when the phone rings.

Close the loop without being asked. If the patient is told when it is ready, they stop asking whether it is ready. This is obvious and almost nobody does it consistently, because it is one more thing to remember at the exact moment everyone is busiest.

Make the queue visible. Not to the patient, to the team. If everyone can see what is outstanding and how long it has been outstanding, the conversation stops being "did anyone do that" and starts being "that one is nearly out of time".

What does not help

Asking the team to be more organised. They are already organised; that is why the place functions. The failure is structural, not personal, and the fix has to be structural too.

So does adding another system nobody has time to open. If the new thing does not live where the work already happens, it becomes another interruption, and you have made it worse.

Fifteen minutes, no commitment. We will show you how Freemi would handle it, and tell you plainly if it would not.

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