Mandeep Mudhar, Numark’s director of marketing, explains how to grow your business beyond the pharmacy

Most, if not all, of community pharmacy’s core revenue comes from patient services and care provided from within the pharmacy. With dispensing still at the heart of patient care and profitability, it makes sense that this is where most of your effort and activity will be focused.

With the significant growth in domiciliary care, it is not surprising that many healthcare organisations have been set up to look after patients in and around this environment. Many patients in specialist care under a consultant are now treated at home and this has been evident with the growing number of specialist clinical homecare companies. Those patients with perhaps fewer clinically complex issues will be managed through residential and care homes, and indeed in their own home, usually by local authority funded or private care organisations.

While provision of medicines supply into care homes has long been acknowledged as a pharmacy led and owned service, there are also many other ways community pharmacy can extend its reach outside its bricks and mortar premises. Let’s look at the various opportunities that are available to you.

Care homes

You may well be providing dispensing services and advice to care homes, but are you maximising the opportunities in this sector? It is well known that the biggest issues for patients in this setting revolve around medication errors and failings in the system in ensuring continuity of medicines supply. This is where you can really add value.

In addition to the use of MDS trays, most PMR systems will issue MAR (medicine administration record) sheets that can be used in tracking and monitoring usage of medicines and creating reminders to re-supply for repeat medication patients. There are sophisticated hand-held systems that can be purchased by third party vendors that facilitate an audit trail and proactive management of medicine supply in care homes.

This allows you to provide a service over and above the dispensing of medication as it builds partnerships with the care home team in managing patients. Numark’s comprehensive care home training package supports you to train your staff and care home staff to ensure safe and effective supply of medicines.

Find out from your CCG where these intermediate settings exist, visit them and understand their needs

This also allows you to designate a member of your team as the care home lead, creating headroom for you. Having a lead care home member of staff managing all aspects of building and growing relationships with care homes means that you can redesign the processes in your pharmacy to ensure that dispensing of walk in and care home prescriptions is seamless and clear responsibilities designated.

Patients in residential care can also benefit from an MUR so that they and those who care for them fully understand the medicines they are using and ensuring they are getting the best out of what has been prescribed. And you have a captive audience, which allows you to maximise the number of MURs provided in any given period and conducted in the care setting. If MURs are conducted off site, the contractor needs to get permission from the local area team.

Intermediate care

With increasing pressure on hospitals to release patients back into primary care, new intermediate care settings have emerged which provide a primary care environment if it is deemed risky for patients to be allowed home.

These may be community hospitals or specialised care homes providing services such as the Discharge to Assess schemes now prevalent in some CCGs. And every one of these patients will require your assistance in supplying pharmaceuticals for administering to patients by trained professionals.

Some of the supply elements are tendered out under the OJEU framework (Official Journal of the European Union – the publication in which all tenders from the public sector which are valued above a certain financial threshold according to EU legislation, must be published) and some are informal arrangements with a local pharmacy.

Find out from your CCG where these intermediate settings exist, visit them and understand their needs. Understand how you can work with them, even if to start with it is on an ad hoc, small-scale basis. The reality is that care in this sector is only set to grow as more patients are released from secondary care quicker than they should be, and it could become a significant part of your business.

Advice and support to schools

The Department of Health’s recent decision to refer schools to local community pharmacies for advice on using emergency inhalers can only be a good thing in developing further relationships. Visit your local schools and ask to be given an opportunity to highlight the role of community pharmacy to the students. These are your patients of the future and loyalty built at this early age can have a beneficial effect for many years to come.

As pharmacy continues to evolve in response to the changing population and demands on the NHS, it is crucial that your business adapts. Extending your reach beyond your physical pharmacy environment will build new relationships and secure customers for the future, but more importantly it provides alternative and additional income streams as the funding model changes.