Promotion


‘as a knock-on effect, staff have more time to spend with patients and deal with all the new referrals coming from the gP surgeries who are asking patients to utilise the pharmacy as their first port of call.’


Scott conlon, pharmacy manager at Mackie Pharmacies, has also witnessed massive improvements in work practices thanks to the new technology.


‘We have always been a busy pharmacy in terms of walk-ins and we prioritise our walk-ins in order to minimise the time we keep customers waiting in the shop,’ he told SP.


‘We've had steady growth as the pharmacy continued to get busier with walk-ins, providing new enhanced services. The push to make community pharmacy the first point of contact certainly increased the demand for both the pharmacists’ and pharmacy staff's time. This made it difficult for us to get our surgery prescriptions and daily tasks finished which heaped mounting pressure on staff. We needed a way to improve our efficiency and free up more time for staff to both complete their tasks and spend time with patients.


‘With the cOVID-19 crisis, we found ourselves under pressure like never before. We had a mountain of prescriptions coming from gP surgeries every day and we also experienced a shortage of staff through some staff members shielding, one taking early retirement, general sickness and two-week self-isolation.


Stepps Pharmacy


‘With all pharmacies experiencing the same issues and untold demand, there was no real way to replace staff at short notice. This was when BD rowa showed its true worth as we were able to still operate and get customers in and out, minimising any impact to our level of service. Without ‘rab the robot’, we simply wouldn't have coped.


‘We moved into a brand new shop and had a chance to move forward and utilise new technologies in order to improve our dispensing process, making us more efficient and putting in extra safety measures in order to minimise risk to patients.


‘The robot has freed up extra time for staff by increasing general efficiency.


One dispenser is able to dispense and label almost twice as much as before as they no longer have to go to shelves to collect stock, the robot brings it to them. When stock comes into the shop, it is ticked off on the invoice as before, but the new system means that we no longer need someone to carry out the time- consuming process of putting it all on the correct shelves.


‘The box of stock gets tipped onto a conveyor belt connected to the robot and the robot puts the stock away for you, while staff get on with whatever other jobs they've got to do. The robot freeing up time has meant we've been able to ensure we are dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts all of the time. Lower priority tasks no longer get forgotten about or


missed and has meant that the pharmacy runs smoother day to day.


‘The new system hasn't changed the checking process for myself, but I have found that fewer mistakes make it as far as me. The robot scans the barcode of each drug as it is input into the robot and so can't pick and dispense the wrong drug. This has dramatically reduced the human error element as dispensers are no longer going to the shelf and picking the wrong drug, strength or form.


‘as with all other pharmacies, cOVID- 19 came out of nowhere and no one was prepared for it, but with our robot we were as prepared as we could have been. It's never ideal to have a team member off sick, but now it's no longer a disaster when it happens. as the number of cOVID cases increases again, we may experience something similar to the beginning of cOVID, but we know we will be able to cope with the extra help from the robot.


‘We've been using the robot for a year now and we are still finding new ways to implement it into our processes. I’m sure we will still find new advantages in the future that we haven't realised or thought even of, but I’m confident that we’ll be able to cope.’


For more information contact: Karen.mcwilliam@BD.com Mobile: +44(0)7876861754 bd.com/rowa


Stepps Pharmacy


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