Cliff McElhinney, UCA President with Colm Magee, Sales Director, Teva UK with the pharmacy team at Bannside Pharmacy
Passionate about Pharmacy
The Community Pharmacy of the year went to the team at Bannside Pharmacy in Portglenone, making it a double celebration for the team.
Bannside Pharmacy … for a healthier, happier community. They understand that when putting the patient first, the profit takes care of itself. Their unique selling point is their speciality in complementary medicines and supplements, in combination with their passion for public health (nutrition, activity & stress management).
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More specifically their objectives are include making every contact count – when handing over prescriptions they open the bag discretely and check with the patient (or if appropriate, their representative) that they have received what was ordered and if they have any questions about their medicines / know why they are taking them. This opens up opportunities for lifestyle advice and/or link sales.
The team focus primarily on healthcare related products, keeping a wide range of popular but equally
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pharmacyinfocus.co.uk
annside Pharmacy business objectives are summed up by their motto/mission statement:
importantly evidence based medicines and supplements. This requires constantly reviewing what they stock. They complete 20 Managing your Medicines and as many follow-ups as they can an in the last two years have completed 120 MURs and 20 Managing your Medicines and are on course for the same this year.
Their objectives have resulted in a marked growth in counter sales. Pharmacist Eoghan O’Brien says, “While it is encouraging to see such good growth in counter sales, for us the real barometer of how we are performing is feedback from our customers. We had 100 people enrolled in our Portglenone Gets Healthy! 12 week Wellbeing & Weight Loss Programme from September to December 2014 and had 74 anonymous evaluation forms returned expressing a high level of satisfaction with the quality of information from our pharmacy team and numerous positive comments about their experience with us.
“Our unique selling point is our speciality in complementary medicines and supplements, in combination with our passion for public health (nutrition, activity & stress management).
This also attracts quite a few customers from well outside of our locality with some of them travelling up to 30 miles. We frequently recommend some form of complementary medicine when counter prescribing (as long as the patient is happy for us to do so. If they prefer the conventional approach, we are careful to respect that) from the following ranges of quality natural medicines and products.
“We feel that many of these products can help address the cause of ill health, as well as treating symptoms, but whether we are dealing with customers/patients who are interested in complementary therapies and treatments or the regular type requiring prescription &/or OTC medicines we give out the same
lifestyle support and remind them about the benefits of good nutrition.”
Bannside Pharmacy can see the potential for what pharmacy is capable of delivering in Northern Ireland in terms of improving the quality of patients’ health and in the process making significant savings for the NHS. This has been evidenced especially in the PGH programme which has been received positively by and developed strong multidisciplinary links.
Eoghan continues, “We are very fortunate to have received a few national awards in the past 16 months. The subsequent publicity that this has generated has reflected positively on what community pharmacy in Northern Ireland is capable of delivering.”
Eoghan is a member of this year’s 2015 Pharmacy Show Advisory Board, which has been established to steer the show’s revamped education, training and conference content. He is
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