Do you have trouble handing over important tasks to your employees?
Owning a community pharmacy is a big job, and you probably like to be in control. However, delegating appropriate tasks to your employees is a big part of keeping your pharmacy running smoothly. But handing over the wrong kind of tasks (or none at all) can do the opposite.
Remember: you can only grow your business so much on your own. Allowing others to take over some important responsibilities will help you achieve the goals you have for your pharmacy and enhance patient care.
Check out these five tasks that every pharmacy owner can, and should, assign their staff for a more efficient pharmacy.
Customer service
Interacting with customers is a big part of working in a pharmacy. You help customers purchase their prescriptions, locate an over-the-counter medication, and answer basic medical questions they may have.
As a pharmacy owner, you want to be sure that you hire someone with the right personality and attitude to make the experience as pleasant as possible for customers. They should be friendly, kind, and have strong interpersonal skills. They should also be able to answer technical questions about insurance coverage and copays in a simplified way that customers will understand
Front-end management
With a pharmacy to run, you have a plethora of tasks to keep up with. The last thing you should be doing is taking on the front-end by yourself. Give yourself a break, and hire a front-end manager who can merchandise your front-end products, handle buying, merchandising, and rearranging products.
While you will want to have a pharmacist available to help patients with over-the-counter product questions, everything else can be left to your front-end manager.
Daily operations
With all the roles you play each day in the pharmacy, you don’t have time for the day-to-day operations that maybe you once did. Inputting patient information, managing prescription data, or handling claims reconciliations. In fact, you can even delegate purchasing to a staff member.
If you train your staff well, they’ll have no problem handling these tasks. You might even consider investing in automation to maximize efficiency, reduce errors, and take tasks completely out of people’s hands.
Inventory management
With inventory as your pharmacy’s biggest asset, it’s important. However, that doesn’t mean you have to handle placing orders daily on your own.
Train a staff member you trust to handle ordering and managing inventory. Work closely with the staff member to order profitably and efficiently. Teach her how to optimize organization and workflow so items are easier to find and always there when the pharmacist needs them.
You might even invest in a computer system with perpetual inventory management capabilities. This will not only make it easier on your staff, but more efficient for your pharmacy.
The checkout counter
Your patients’ checkout experience matters. No one likes to stand in line for more than a few minutes, so if your checkout is lagging, now is the time to delegate staff members to come to the rescue when the line starts growing. Ringing up purchases shouldn’t be your job. Trusting your employees to run the checkout will allow your pharmacist to spend time on patient care.
If you’re still feeling hesitant to hand over certain jobs to your technicians, remember that both formal and informal training are available. You can even make sure they receive nationally accredited certification as a minimum standard so that you know job responsibilities will be done properly.
Once your staff is trained and certified, you can begin utilizing their new skills behind the counter. Ease them in slowly until both of you are comfortable. By doing so, you’ll lessen your own workload while creating a much more successful pharmacy.
A Member-Owned Company Serving Independent Pharmacies
PBA Health is dedicated to helping independent pharmacies reach their full potential on the buy-side of their business. Founded and owned by pharmacists, PBA Health serves independent pharmacies with group purchasing services, wholesaler contract negotiations, proprietary purchasing tools, and more.
An HDA member, PBA Health operates its own NABP-accredited secondary wholesaler with more than 6,000 SKUs, including brands, generics, narcotics CII-CV, cold-storage products, and over-the-counter (OTC) products — offering the lowest prices in the secondary market.
