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Winners' stories: The lights of Broadway

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Winners' stories: The lights of Broadway

Pharmacy Team of the Year 2017 went to Broadway Pharmacy in Fulwood, Lancashire where staff are considered the foundations of its success

Broadway Pharmacy is located in Fulwood, a relatively affluent area of Preston, which serves a wide-ranging community, from young families to the elderly. It was founded over 60 years ago.

The business has always strived for excellence to set itself apart, with a real emphasis on customer service provided by knowledgeable and experienced staff. Indeed, it considers its staff the foundations to its success with its dedicated team all sharing the same goal of improving the healthcare and services available to its local community.

The experienced team are experts in dealing with a wide range of patients with differing pharmaceutical needs, from patients who manage their medication themselves at home, to those with complex and changeable medication regimes. It’s the team’s positive outlook that makes Broadway special, maintains Teresa Flannery, dispensing manager, who has worked there for over 15 years. “We pride ourselves on going the extra mile,” she says.

That level of service has been recognised locally, too, as Broadway won this year’s Health Heroes Pharmacy of the Year run by the Lancashire Post. It’s a big lineup. “The team comprises two pharmacists, three technicians (one an accuracy checker), three dispensers (one an accuracy checker), one apprentice dispenser, two pre-registration pharmacists, one retail manager, five part-time healthcare assistants and four part-time delivery drivers,” Teresa explains. “Two third-year pharmacy students are also employed for Saturday and sessional work.”

Broadway’s ongoing investment in training – despite pressured times – made its entry stand out. “With the cuts it would have been easy to step back and turn away from training, but they decided against that,” she explains. They saw that the future lay in developing the team and the services that they provided. Patients appreciated the services and that invigorated and inspired the whole team.

Broadway has trained up several NVQ level apprentices; there are currently two pre-registration pharmacists following on from two earlier in the year; GPs and non-medical prescribers (NMPs) spend time there to gain experience of community pharmacy; and the senior management team has undertaken a level 5 NVQ leadership and management course. One of the pharmacists is undertaking a nonmedical prescribing course with a view to launching services based round the qualification. Broadway Pharmacy was the first accredited Level 2 Healthy Living Pharmacy in the Preston and South Ribble area. It has three staff who have undergone HLP leadership training and has five Healthy Living Champions. Every member of staff has completed brief HLP intervention training. Three members of the team are trained as smoking cessation advisers, too. The pharmacy operates a private travel clinic where pharmacists can administer vaccinations and provide anti-malarials without the need for a private prescription.

Several team members are trained to provide NHS Health Checks, which the pharmacy has been commissioned to deliver. The pharmacy has carried out over 1,000 New Medicine Service interventions in the past two years and has been in the top three performing pharmacies for two years running in the national ’flu vaccination service. The pharmacy has collaborated with local GP surgeries in technician pilot schemes (where technicians work in surgeries dealing with such matters as medication queries and medicines optimisation). One has been so successful that the technician is still in one of the surgeries 12 months later.

Becoming the first Healthy Living Pharmacy has allowed it to develop and expand the services it provides to patients. It also offers a minor ailments scheme, smoking cessation service, an erectile dysfunction clinic and a weight management service Teresa says plans for the future include building on the success of the travel clinic. “We’ll promote it more and I can see we’ve got a lot of untapped opportunity there to grow that clinic,” she says. They are also looking to boost the number of NHS Health Checks they carry out and they’ll also be exploring how they can use their newly qualified Non Medical Prescriber pharmacist, Mark Ork, to best effect. “There’s the possibility of an urgent care service,” she says.

The lights are certainly shining bright at Broadway

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