0: Welcome to the AJP podcast,
a podcast for pharmacists by pharmacists where we discuss current events,
relevant topics, and emerging issues. I'm your host, Carlene McMaugh,
and together with the AJP,
I'm bringing you the opinions and expertise of different pharmacists to discuss
their views and insights on topics relevant to pharmacists.
Please like and rate each episode and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss
an episode.
1: So is it okay to do your introduction please?
2: So, hi everyone, my name is Kristina Fox.
I am a community pharmacist and a pharmacy owner who owns Complete Care Pharmacy
in Rosny Park, in Hobart, in Tasmania.
And we have completely transformed our pharmacy over the last couple of years to
become a professional service health destination.
And we have a completely different layout.
We've got technology that overlays that layout and facilitates having
pharmacists on the floor at all times maximizing the impact that they can have
with their patients.
I'm really proud of the model that we've created and I can't wait to have a chat
to you about it today. Carlene.
1: Thank you so much.
Can I find out your views on what the challenges or the problems are with the
current traditional community pharmacy model?
2: Yeah, absolutely.
So I've been a community pharmacist now for about 14 or 15 years,
and I've been working in community pharmacies for over 20 years,
and I think we face lots of challenges at the moment,
but the biggest challenge I find is that pharmacists are wanting to do so much
more. So we're wanting to do more than just checking prescriptions,
but our current environment doesn't really enable us to do so.
So I find that our layouts haven't really changed.
Nobody's really looked at the way that a pharmacy's laid out and gone,
oh my gosh, why do we do all of this work all around our dispensaries?
And we have all these people working in such a small cramped little space trying
to provide counseling to patients.
I think one of the challenges is our current environment that we work in.
Another challenge is that our technology,
whilst there has been some improvements in the technology space,
we haven't really got any enablers to let us work more efficiently and
effectively. And then also pharmacies don't really have any
private spaces for patients either.
So I think that's a big challenge is that we're wanting to do more,
but we're trying to do it at a shop counter.
So that's not ideal at the moment.
I guess one of the other challenges that we face is that patients are now
consuming their information differently and a lot of people are accessing
information online and that's probably not the
best way to access information.
But also there's so many products now that are available in supermarkets,
so that's another challenge that we face in the industry.
1: Can you please tell me some of the biggest challenges with the current layout of
community pharmacies?
2: Yeah, so I sort of touched on that just before,
but I guess one of the biggest challenges is that patient walks into a pharmacy,
they bee-line straight for the dispensary where they want to hand in their
prescription,
and so they hand it into a shop assistant and then it goes into the
dispensary and then people all crowd around the dispensary counter,
and then pharmacists are wanting to hand out prescriptions at the scripts out
counter.
But the issue is that then there's all these other patients waiting for their
prescriptions in that area and they're overhearing all of those private and
intimate conversations.
And so it's just you go to the doctor and you have an
appointment with the GP and it's in a room and it's very professional and
it's private and you're talking about sensitive health information.
And then we as pharmacists want to talk in our communities at counters and it
just doesn't work very well. So you've got all this hub of activity in one
really small space and it makes it really difficult to be productive and
effective at our jobs. So I think that's a big challenge.
And then you've got other people presenting for all the different things that
they might present to a Scripps encounter to say that they're here for an
appointment for a vaccination or that they want to
access a prescription that was faxed to the pharmacy.
Just the way that we're set up now makes it chaotic in community
pharmacy.
And I've walked into lots of pharmacies recently and pharmacies that aren't
doing large script volumes, but it's just feel like it's chaos.
And I feel like a lot of that is owing to the way that our pharmacies were set
out and how have we morphed into the way that we practise now.
It's really just morphed into that over time,
and we've tacked on a clinic room here and a clinic room there,
but just adding something doesn't necessarily solve the problem,
if that makes sense.
1: Very true, very true.
Can I ask you about your point of difference,
I guess your point of difference for Complete Care Pharmacy where you're looking
at community pharmacy?
2: Okay, so for those that are listening today,
probably wondering what's the difference between Complete Care Pharmacy and any
other pharmacy? So we were a Terry White ChemMart actually,
when we decided to make the change to Complete Care Pharmacy and Complete Care
Pharmacies is now become a franchise and there's quite a few of them popping up
across Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland,
which is really exciting, but the model is radically different.
So when you walk through the door, you don't see a sign that says scripts in,
you see a sign that says 'Care starts here' because we want pharmacies to become
known for so much more than just prescriptions.
We want pharmacists to be known as,
I guess the givers of health advice, which we always have done.
But so you walk in the door, you see a triage desk,
so a triage desk is where we can input the patient into our system
so we can input lots of different things. We can input appointment types,
we can input a minor query,
we can input any consultation with any type of prescription.
And then at that point when you walk into the pharmacy,
you'll see that you can't actually visually see a dispensary.
So actually the dispensary is sort of hidden away
out of the sight of the patient.
So that can become the hub of where all the dispensing gets done.
And then there's also little pods,
which are basically tiny little consult rooms,
much smaller than a traditional bigger clinic room,
but they have a chute for dispensing robots so that the pharmacist can take the
patient there and directly dispense with the patient.
So Complete Care Pharmacy's point of difference is that you've got a triage
area,
you've got these little pods that medication can be dispensed with the patient,
and then you've got a production area.
There's also other little areas of check-in.
So we have self-serve check-in areas,
and we have pharmacotherapy check-in spaces where patients that are on the
pharmacotherapy program can enter themselves in.
And I guess all of this is facilitated by our digital workflow solution called
Excipient, which we created that overlays this layout.
It sounds very complicated when I say it out loud,
but in practice it works really well.
1: Because you've mentioned software and I've heard you've come up with your own.
So very multi-talented come up with your own software.
How is this different to the other software.
2: Systems? Yeah, I think as a pharmacist,
one of my frustrations has always been that we have all these tabs open in our
pharmacy. So
we have a software solution that helps with pharmacotherapy.
We have a software solution that helps with Webster packing.
We have something that helps with click and collect orders,
but nothing that sort of integrates and pulls everything together.
So it's just like another tab or another thing that we have to do as
pharmacists. So the software we've created is called Excipient,
and I must disclose,
I'm definitely not the person that wrote the code because I'm pharmacist not in
that space, but I know what pharmacists want.
And so if I could have mapped out exactly what we needed to
tie everything together, that's what we've done. So essentially what it is,
it's a way to triage a patient in whether they are walking into the
pharmacy, ringing up, having a phone call, tapping through an order,
and then creating a digital basket with that patient that can be seen from
anywhere within the store. Now that sounds pretty crazy,
but let's just give you a real life example.
So the patient walks into the pharmacy,
they're greeted by a pharmacist on the floor at the triage area
or a pharmacy assistant. It really doesn't matter who it is.
And you ask the patient, what are you here for today? And they say, oh,
I've got a prescription on my phone, I've got a digital script.
I also have some scripts I want to grab that I keep on file.
So Excipient means that you can basically log in.
This is in the middle of the pharmacy. It could be anywhere in the pharmacy,
but specifically in complete care out a triage desk,
we can look up the patient's script on file and scan in their digital script and
create a basket with that patient. You can add in multiple patients,
so you could add in mom, dad, grandma,
you can add in a consultation type. So they might say, oh, so why I'm here?
I want to grab a vaccine so you can create a digital basket.
Now at the point in creating the digital basket, we always said to patient,
are you waiting or calling back?
So we can indicate if they're waiting or calling back.
And if they're calling back,
we can actually automate an SMS to them when their prescription is ready.
We can see real wait times with Excipients,
so it lets you know what's in the system and we can tell the patient there's a
five minute wait or a 10 minute wait currently,
which allows them to make a decision.
And then once we create a digital basket with them,
it fully integrates with Fred Dispense Plus.
And so that basket goes into the dispensing program and it queues up the
patient's basket electronically in order of the priority that the patient's
there. So you might have three patients waiting for prescriptions and they're
all timestamped,
and so it has all of the work that's in the pharmacy in the order that it's due
to be done in, which sounds like, oh, Kristina, why is that helpful?
It's helpful because we have all these inputs into our dispensaries from
multiple different sources.
So from click and collect from that patient walking in,
adding in a prescription in the pharmacy to, I dunno,
a prescription being emailed through.
And we want to be able to order all of the work that we have to do so that it
takes away all of that effort that we have to go to every day going,
is that a waiter? Are they calling back? Who's next?
So I can have three or four dispense techs working on baskets and everything is
queued up according to the priority that they need to work on it. So if
someone's calling back in 15 minutes and then all of a sudden 13 minutes has
elapsed,
that person's basket goes to the top because you don't want them to come back
and their order not be ready. It's very hard to explain over a podcast.
In fact,
I feel that a lot of people don't really quite understand it until they come and
visit the store and see how easy it is to use.
So we wanted to make sure that the software was really simple, really easy,
faster than what we're currently doing because you don't want to do something if
it's going to make the process more cumbersome. So it's way faster,
but also the one benefit is that it splits the baskets into where they need to
go.
So what I mean by that is if the person's coming into the pharmacy and they're
asking to add that digital script and that script on file and they've had it
plenty of times before, they don't need any intervention from the pharmacist,
it goes into that production area that I spoke to you about at the start,
which is where our dispen techs do all of the dispensing. But if for example,
they come into the pharmacy and it's a new medication or they have a question
for the pharmacist,
it actually queues up the work for the pod pharmacist and then the pod
pharmacist can call the patient in and they see their queue of work.
So it kind of splits all the baskets up and sends it to the appropriate person
at the pharmacy so that you can become more efficient. Does that make sense?
But it's easy to use that promise.
1: So currently, so with the current model,
advice is given usually at the desk and then you use a consultation room to do
extra services like vaccinations, things like that.
But you use for consultation rooms to provide lots of other services and allied
health, and I even heard about a lactation nurse.
So can you tell me a little bit about the other services that you have and how
you utilize those rooms?
And then I guess I'd probably want to ask about remuneration and how you make
sure that the patients see value in it and want to invest money
into the services.
2: Yeah, absolutely.
So we've got essentially these three pods in our pharmacy that are directly
connected to our robot where these are the rooms that our pharmacists
predominantly use. So yes, we do do vaccinations and things,
but actually one thing that's quite different is we have all of our health
conversations in those pods, so we don't talk about anything on the shop floor.
So for example, if a patient walks into the pharmacy and says,
my son is struggling with constipation,
pharmacy system will add that as a basket and the pharmacist will call the
patient into the room,
they'll do a consultation with that patient and they will write out a
pharmacist prescription pad with recommendations.
And it's very different having a consultation for health like that for a minor
ailment in a pod opposed to doing it in the middle of the pharmacy in front of
the product. When you're in front of the product and you're recommending for
somebody, it almost feels like you're selling to them, if that makes sense.
When you're in the pod and you're listening to their symptoms and then you're
addressing their symptoms and you're providing health solutions in the room,
it feels completely different and patients see value in that.
So when you talk about what's our remuneration like in that situation,
people are asking us all the time, what do I owe you for that?
Because they see that advice that we've traditionally always given a counter in
front of the product as a really valuable thing to them,
and they're always asking me to pay.
We're starting to charge for some of our minor ailment consultations,
so we'll charge $15 for a wound care consultation, for example.
We'll charge for, say for example,
we might give advice about plant-based medicine and we recommend particular
terpenes or something like that. We will charge for that consultation.
So it's a lot easier to charge the patient for health advice when you're doing
it in a really clinical setting. So our pharmacists use those pods,
but then you're right, we also do have two larger clinic rooms necessarily,
well, they're not connected to our robot,
but we do have allied health professionals working in them.
So we have a full-time nurse practitioner in our pharmacy as well as lactation
consultants that help I guess new moms or moms to be with
feeding issues.
We've got a continence nurse that works in the pharmacy and we also have a
diabetes educator.
But what we found is that we had all of these services in our old model,
but what we found was that whilst I love collaborating with allied health
professionals, it can become quite laborious when you have to,
the patient walks in and says that they've got an appointment and you know that
the nurse practitioner's someone with them and you have to say, wait,
she's got someone with her take a seat. So your staff end up doing a lot of the
reception work when you're hosting allied health professionals in your clinic
rooms with Excipient, which is our software, the patient comes in,
they go to that triage area, we can create an appointment with them,
and then that appointment goes again into that room with that Allied Health
Professional.
Mrs. Jones is here for her appointment with the nurse practitioner at 1:00 PM
and that person in that room can see what all her body of work is,
and she can then call out the next patient into her room.
We are able to use that to communicate notes to them in there.
So we don't actually use sticky notes or handwritten notes in our pharmacy at
all Now. We use it all electronically through Excipient, but essentially, yeah,
I hope that answers the question.
We do so much in the rooms and we look for gaps in our community.
So essentially what is it that our community needs?
And lactation consultants was one of those examples.
1: So obviously you would've invested a lot into the layout and
the structure of the pharmacy, not knowing at the time,
I guess if it would've paid off and if people would've seen value in it.
So you would've taken a huge risk in the beginning.
2: Yeah, no, absolutely. It was a huge risk and my business partner, Julie and I,
we were quite worried when we were planning it out because it is very different
and community pharmacy has been practising the same way for such a long time.
And so patients are used to making that bee-line for the dispensary that
script's in sign. And so we were actually very anxious about it,
and I remember we said to each other,
we'll work every hour that we're open for the first few weeks to see how it goes
and make sure patients are okay.
And what we found was it took a lot less time than what we thought for people to
be okay with a new model. They were okay with it from day one,
and patients are constantly thanking us for this model,
and we get so much more out of,
I guess the interactions that we have with the patients because of the way that
the pharmacy is operating now.
So patients don't get a lot of time with their GPS anymore.
They want to speak to the pharmacist,
but pharmacists don't know how they can spend time on the floor interacting with
patients during the day because they've always had to be the ones to check the
prescriptions.
So the way that we've been able to address this with our model is that we have a
pharmacist who works in that production space, that checking space,
and they stay there for that day.
So they answer the questions on the phone for the pharmacist,
they check the prescriptions, they check the Webster packs,
and they keep the hub of the bulk of the dispensary going and the dispen
text to all the dispensing, and then that allows us to push pharmacists.
So we have two pharmacists working on our shop floor doing consultations all
day. So whilst it was scary doing something different and new,
I think that if you're always focused on health outcomes for your patients,
then it's going to pay off for you because people see the value in it. And
I'm really proud of our team for embracing it,
but it has been actually a very easy transition,
much easier than I thought because it's made the software and the layout and the
changes made us more efficient.
We actually felt after a few weeks of being open that we've made a big mistake
because the pharmacy felt a lot quieter. But in fact, since we've been open,
we've had 20,
about 20 to 25% growth in customer numbers had huge
growth in our script numbers.
Our gross profits up about 35% on what it was year
before, so we're much busier.
Our actual services income has gone up over 60% since we
opened, and so we're way busier than we were,
but we are actually way more efficient and we have more time with our
patients, which is pretty exciting.
1: How long has this model been in place?
2: So we opened on the 4th of September, 2023,
so it's almost been a year since we've been opened,
and we've been deploying changes to our software every fortnight since
we've been open. So it's become more sophisticated,
more integrated with the clinical things that we're doing in pharmacy.
We see it as a platform to enable us to practice to our full scope as well,
so we can utilize it. For example,
as soon as Tasmania was able to do urinary tract infection consultations,
we just added a button on triage, and now if a patient comes in for a UTI,
the pharmacy system or pharmacist can just click on that button,
you take the patient in, you can do the consultation in the pod,
go through all the questions, dispense the medication, do the counseling,
and away you go all in one hit. It's good.
It's exciting.
1: So I guess I'd ask, what are your hopes for your current model?
Since you are almost a year in and it sounds like you're constantly
adjusting things and tailoring them, which is great.
So what do you hope it will look like in the next couple of years?
2: Yeah,
so I think the hope for Complete Care Pharmacy is I'd love to see Complete Care
Pharmacies opening up all around Australia,
and the reason being is it's been so impactful on the health of our local
community that I'd love to see other pharmacists embracing and adopting these
change so that they can do more for their communities as well.
My hope is that this model is,
I guess a disruptor in the industry.
The last disruptor that we've had was Chemist Warehouse,
and that's driven a low service, high volume model in my opinion.
I think it's about time that we flip things upside down and we go,
we want to prove that pharmacists are integral to the healthcare system.
We can help.
We've got a healthcare crisis at the moment where patients either don't have a
GP or they can't get timely access to their gp. So
the hope is that there complete care pharmacy out there which can fill that gap
in the healthcare system.
So in every complete care pharmacy we will have will be registered NDIS
agencies, which is helpful for communities.
We'll all have access to a nurse practitioner for every hour that the pharmacy
is open,
which is also amazing for patients and we'll be operating in this manner.
My hope for the future is also that we'll continue to innovate and evolve this
model. So what it is right now is sort of the base level entry,
which by the way, we think is pretty good,
but we want it to always be evolving and getting better.
So this is what we're doing now,
but come and look at what we're doing in six months time in another 12 months
time, another 18 months time,
and we hope that we can be leading the way in the pharmacy industry.
We're definitely not scared of change,
and we think that the way that we've got it set up now allows us to integrate
and add anything that we need to on for our patients, which is exciting.
I hope that explained it. Okay. It.
1: Did. I was also interested your pharmacy assistants training,
because obviously they're performing to a standard that is probably
higher than other pharmacy technicians. So what does their training look like?
2: Yeah, so with Complete Care, it definitely involves,
so we didn't have to employ any new staff when we moved to this model,
but everybody changed their role, if that makes sense.
So the training for the pharmacy assistants is a lot of
upskilling of pharmacy assistants to become dispense techs because in this model
we have our dispense techs processing all of the prescriptions.
We think that's outside of being with in the pods because our pharmacists do
dispensing the pods. But in our production area,
it's a dispensed text and we think that pharmacists are sometimes a wasted
resource being in the dispensary,
just typing away at the computer and printing out labels.
So we are upskilling our pharmacy assistants to do more teching roles.
Our techs are also being upskilled to do other things like compounding.
So we are a compounding pharmacy and our dispense techs do all of the
compounding. It's not done by a pharmacist,
obviously everything's checked by a pharmacist, but the tech does that.
They run the packing area of the pharmacy.
They do all of our claiming, they differ in our prescriptions,
they go through the email.
So they do a lot of the jobs that previously our pharmacists were doing that
pharmacists don't add value by doing that.
They add value by having one-on-one consultations with patients and providing
health advice. So that's what we did.
We've also upskilled our pharmacy assistance through NDIS training.
So what that means is that we can provide patients with
medication packing on the NDIS consumables on the NDIS.
We can do things like anything that's a private prescription.
We actually do a lot medicinal cannabis and compounding on the NDIS,
so upskilling our pharmacy assistants in creating service agreements with
patients and looking for ways to assist them in that space.
So yeah, definitely a change in roles has been what we did.
And that's probably been one of the biggest changes for I guess our pharmacy
staff is yes, there was a difference in the layout and a process,
but it's a way to handle the patient.
So no longer are our pharmacy assistants going through all of the questions with
the patient when they walk through the door,
which I know that's quite different to the way we've been doing things in a
pharmacy for a long time,
but we feel as though the way that we were doing that previously meant that we
were double handling everything.
What I mean by that is if the patient came in and requested something for
thrush, for example,
and a pharmacy assistant goes through all the questioning and then they have to
go and relay it to the pharmacist who's standing in the dispensary,
and then the pharmacist comes out and asks the questions again,
it takes twice as long and the patient gets frustrated because they ask the
questions twice. So now when they come in for something,
our pharmacy assistant will triage them in, create a digital basket,
and then the pharmacist will see that the patient's there for thrush.
They'll call the patient into the pod, they'll do a consultation,
write out a pharmacist's prescription pad for them and then go and grab the
products for them and away we go.
So it's a lot more efficient and it provides much better outcomes.
Our basket size, for example,
from a business perspective,
has gone from less than $10 to over $20 OTC
in this model,
and it's been very easy to achieve that because patients are genuinely,
they just want help and pharmacists are there perfect people to provide that
help and advice.
1: I thought I'd ask with the announcement of the 8CPA and with the discussions
about scope of practice,
how do you see integrating those to better utilize your model and
take of those.
2: Opportunities?
I think the better question I think is if you aren't set up like
we are now,
how the hell is your pharmacy going to do full scope? That's my question.
So I genuinely don't know how a pharmacy will efficiently
integrate full scope into their practice without something like complete care.
So I think about the patient journey,
they walk into the pharmacy. Number one,
patients don't know what pharmacists can do already. Number two,
pharmacists are going to be able to do a lot more,
but if you've got pharmacists standing in a dispensary,
checking prescriptions and having their workflow interrupted by
pharmacy assistant saying, oh, this person's here for a consult for a UTI,
and then having to go into a room that's not connected to a dispensary,
do a consultation and then head back to the dispensary to dispense medication,
that sounds very inefficient to me. So the way our model works is that the
patient will present, they'll be triaged in for their health need,
and then they will be added to the queue for the relevant person,
and then they can go in and do the full consultation dispensing everything
within a pod. I think it'll be seamless. Well,
it is seamless for us already.
So I'm actually really excited for what 8CPA is going to bring to community
pharmacy.
And I just think that we need something like Excipient and Complete Care to be
able to facilitate that easily for pharmacists because pharmacists want to do
like oh, far out, we want to do more to help the system.
But a lot of pharmacists that I speak to,
I just already bogged down in the day-to-day operations and running of their
business and their pharmacies that they don't know how they can possibly do
more. So hopefully we've got a good solution for pharmacists out there.
1: So you've mentioned franchising and going across, sorry,
I guess I'd ask how are pharmacists getting in contact with you in case other
pharmacists want to, and with the franchising,
does that mean that you obviously have a system in place so that
everybody can roll it out to have some consistency and I guess a way to
monitor efficiency and effectiveness?
2: So we've got an amazing team behind us at Complete Care Pharmacies.
So we've been building this franchise model for a couple of years now,
and we wanted to make sure that we had the right team behind us.
We wanted to make sure that we've got business development managers that can
check in with the stores regularly.
We've got pharmacists who are training our pharmacists within the pods.
We wanted to make sure we even have pharmacy assistant teams that are training
our pharmacy assistants. Big training is a big part of it,
innovation, and we want to continually evolve the model.
And that's really important because that's what we wanted to achieve with
Complete Care Pharmacies. If you walk into my pharmacy in Hobart,
you get the exact same experience as when you walk into one in Queensland or New
South Wales.
So I'm really proud to say that Complete Care Pharmacy is not a brand that's
necessarily aligned with a wholesaler,
but it's actually a brand that's created by pharmacists for pharmacists and has
an amazing team behind it.
1: So I guess I'd ask, well, I've asked you most of my questions.
I thought I'd ask you if there's anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to
share.
2: Trying to think. Look, I
think I'm just,
I'd love people to get in touch with me if they want to know more,
and I've mentioned that before.
I think I'm most proud of the way that Excipient integrates with what we've got.
I think it's hard to explain over a podcast,
but I'd love people to get in touch so that they can find out more about that as
well. And I think we've covered most of the points.
Just I could talk about it for a lot longer in a lot more depth as well.
1: Yeah, because it is interesting. Yeah, you describe it.
I guess sometimes it'd be easy to see a video or something to.
2: See. Oh, so much easier.
1: But I guess I would say that if people,
because some people have got shops at the moment and they've got a
certain amount of space that they can utilize and maybe they won't have the
opportunity to do all of the things that you are doing,
but if there was some advice for people that maybe didn't have all the space or
all the capacity, is there somewhere that they could start to make a difference?
2: Absolutely.
So I think in terms of the space that's required
for this particular model,
I think we've got a store that's coming on board that's 120 metres
squared. I think anything less than that,
you probably wouldn't have the space to do something like this. Also,
there's an investment in automation as well with the robotics.
So that can sometimes be cost prohibitive for people,
but I think that if they want to make a change to the way that they're
practising anyway, and if they don't want to do something like Complete Care,
the best piece of advice I can have is to connect with your local community and
find out what it is that they're needing.
What is it that your local community is after? So the reason,
for example,
that we've decided to integrate nurse practitioners in Complete Care is because
patients were running out of prescriptions and they weren't able to get in to
get repeats from their GP in time,
or they were coming in for something that was very obvious that, for example,
that they might have shingles or that looks like it's an infection that looks
like it's cold sores. And people were saying, well, that's great,
but I don't have a GP,
so do I need to go to emergency for something that's relatively minor.
And so connecting with a nurse practitioner to be able to facilitate that in our
pharmacy was important to me. So I think looking out for gaps
in your community and then trying to fill those gaps is really important.
They could start by becoming registered with the NDIS.
I think that that has huge opportunity for community pharmacy as
well. So there's lots of different things that they can do,
and I'm actually very happy for people to reach out to me if they want some
inspiration within their business, even if they don't want to do this model.
Because I personally love seeing people's businesses thrive,
and I love seeing people being able to help the patients in their community.
So I'd love them to reach out to me regardless of what they want to do with
their business into the future if they need a little bit of inspiration. You
might be very busy. I don't mind. I love being busy. I love it. Well,
I love community pharmacy and for me,
a big reason why we did this is that I've been concerned for community
pharmacies longevity.
You can see that patients can access so many things online nowadays.
They can do their shopping for pharmacy online.
I don't know if you've taken a walk down the pharmacy aisle in the supermarket
recently, but there's so many of our products, they're in supermarkets now,
OLS there, Voltaran gels are there.
It's actually quite scary Zyrtec,
it's quite scary to see what's in the supermarket at the moment.
We're one step away from having community pharmacy going into supermarkets,
and we have to demonstrate, I guess,
our wealth of knowledge and demonstrate why it's so important that community
pharmacy exists.
One thing that we've got with Excipient is we've got the ability to measure how
many consultations we do in a day and what type of consultations we do do.
And that has been fascinating.
So on average we're taking in around 250 to
300 consultations a day. So patient consultations a day,
and we can actually see with our metrics exactly what consultation types they
are. So is that minor ailment advice,
what type of minor ailment advice is that for a medical certificate?
Is that for a vaccination, is that for a new medication?
Is that for a packing query?
So we can actually delve down into those sorts of details.
We can see exactly how long that consultation type is. So on average,
actually I asked last week what our average consultation time was,
and it's six and a half minutes per consult at the moment.
And we can also see all of the metrics for how long our prescriptions take.
So I can see how long it is from the point of input at triage to the point that
it comes out.
And at the moment it's six minutes and 25 seconds in our current model.
So being able to use Excipient for that is also
incredible.
Being able to take a patient into the pod and see that it's a new medication and
schedule a follow-up consultation with them,
there's just so much we can do in pharmacy.
We've just never had the ability to do it or to measure it. And so yeah,
love that part of it too.
1: Oh, look at that. Okay. Very excited.
So I guess, is there anything that I haven't asked you?
I want to make sure that.
2: Everybody best. Look,
I think you've asked me lots of really good questions today, which I appreciate.
I think our patients that come into us are not coming into us because they're
coming in to buy something fun.
They're coming in because they've got health conditions and those,
whether it's asthma or diabetes or epilepsy or I don't know,
recent cancer diagnosis,
these are all really important to that particular person.
And they're very vulnerable.
They've just often when they come into a pharmacy,
they've had a diagnosis from a doctor or a specialist,
and we're that first point of call to pick up that medication.
And I think we haven't been set up properly
to handle this for patients.
And so what I wanted to mention was even if you don't decide to do a model
like this,
try and set your pharmacy up in a way that enables you to have more private
consultations with patients and try and take them in clinic rooms for counseling
and medication advice because patients really need us as
pharmacists to be there for them,
but they're not going to open up and disclose stuff to you at a counter.
And since we've had our new model,
we've realized how impactful these rooms have been for patients to feel like
they can chat to us.
Probably doesn't make sense what I'm saying,
but I think I'm just trying to say that people that come into our pharmacies,
they're very vulnerable, they need time with pharmacists,
let's try and set up our pharmacy so that we can facilitate that for them.
Yeah, hope that makes sense. It.
1: Definitely a lot of sense.
And I guess you can obviously see the benefits with the remuneration from the
patients and all the gratitude,
and I'm guessing you stand out completely from all the other
pharmacies because I've seen you've won a number of awards.
So I'd say congratulations to you for winning all those awards.
I dunno if I would've wanted to be your competitor because it sounds like you're
doing a really good job.
So I guess what I'd like to say is as you go on your journey and as you
continue with the franchises,
it would be great still to reach out to you and see how things are
going for you in the future and how the ING going,
because I think it would be great for the audience to kind of hear with a CPA
coming out, so I'll take it a difference. But with a CPA coming out,
I guess people see benefits with compensation and
getting remunerated for some of the things they've done in the past,
but maybe not looking towards the future and how they can better utilize it or
prepare for it now. So I guess that's what my focus was,
was interviewing you so that people could kind of think, well,
all of these opportunities are coming up.
How has someone done it and how can I prepare myself or better put
myself in a position to be able to deliver on these? So I thought.
2: Thank you. Thank you.
I think it's good because I think they need to be set up so that they can take
on all these opportunities. Absolutely. Because if you don't make a change now,
even if it's just a change in the way that you process patients when they come
in so that you can push dispense texts to be dispensing more on pharmacists to
be, even if you've got a traditional layout, put your pharmacist set scripts in,
scripts out and have your texts processing the scripts so that you can do more
to your point. But also, we're not as pharmacists.
I don't feel like we're really at the moment taking up the opportunities that we
already have. We call our front of shopping complete care,
our front of practice,
because we have all of these things at our fingertips that form
our practice.
What I'm trying to say is a lot of patients don't already know what
pharmacists can do.
They don't realize that pharmacists can essentially prescribe for
conjunctivitis.
They don't realize that pharmacists can prescribe for head lice or for
constipation.
So these are things that we are already doing now that a lot of us
aren't doing well, in my opinion,
that we could do better and we could capitalize on what we've got at the moment.
And then 8CPA, just the cherry on top,
but you've got to be set up and ready to be able to take those opportunities
and then make the most and maximize those opportunities
basically. Yeah.
1: Thank you.
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