Anita Gribbin worked closely with the local community to develop an outstanding range of natural healthcare, new age beauty and homeopathic products. The pharmacy is a hub of knowledge for patients with a wide range of products and staff are well-trained in all areas of natural healthcare.

The team promotes the ranges in a proactive manner, ensuring patients can make the best choices for their health.

The majority of the team at Bidford has been at the pharmacy for over 10 years and with each of them living locally customers are more like friends than patients. The team hosts coffee mornings locally to promote healthy living campaigns and workshops on current health campaigns to support and educate the community. They deliver prescriptions on the way home to any elderly and vulnerable patients unable to collect in themselves.

To avoid having the whole pharmacy team to isolate during the first lockdown, pharmacist owners of Calow split the team into two to work on a week in/ week off rota with a pharmacist and either an ACT or a locum, plus half the dispensers and a delivery driver on each.

The owners stayed in a hotel on their working week before swapping over and doing the same the following week.

This Day Lewis Pharmacy team is all set up to free up the pharmacist, who spends less than half her time in the dispensary, to deliver clinical services. With two ACTs and one ACD, the team takes turns to perform the key roles. Once the pharmacist has clinically checked the scripts and identified any high-risk meds or LASA drugs, they follow through the process. This has resulted in reduced near misses and errors.

After progressing through the ranks in her 25 years in Knights Pharmacy, Deb Collins took up the challenge of turning around a struggling branch. Over the course of 18 months, her intervention and methods led to a near total reduction in number of initial customer complaints, reduced dispensing error rate, enhancement in the diversity of pharmacy service offerings and broad increase in service usage.

Due to a fire, Dosthill Pharmacy was forced to operate from portacabin units – too cold in the winter and roasting in the summer – for two years. Yet the team stayed positive and continued to serve the local community despite their challenges made worse by the pandemic.

The pharmacy implemented all Covid safety measures to ensure patient safety before and after returning to its main home in September 2020.

During her pre-registration year in Kellaway Pharmacy in Bristol, Jee Ji led on a pancreatic cancer awareness campaign that included a raffle where patients could enter if they successfully answered four questions right. This got customers talking about the signs and symptoms of the disease and the whole exercise created such a real buzz in the pharmacy that it led on to other campaigns such as one for Save the Children charity.

Karen was diagnosed with cancer in 2019 but was determined not to let it stop her. Her commitment to the job goes far beyond what is ever expected of anyone and shows her dedication to her community.

She’s spent 30 years working in pharmacy and as an assistant manager in the past three years she has been truly on the frontline, taking pressure off the pharmacist by making sure all the jobs are kept on top of.

Sam Naseem, an independent contractor for Knights Pharmacy, has developed an innovative solution to make stock redistribution across the chain more efficient. A great system which is simple in design but very effective at reducing stock write-off, his innovation has enabled the business to redistribute 12,000 packs of excess stock, with a peak of 70 requests across branches in just one day. This initiative has saved the chain £100,000 of wholesale spend in a year.

Knights Pharmacy has invested in two SymMed robots and the team running the central hub now assemble for 125 compliance aid patients per day across 30 pharmacies via their warehouse DSP. Over the past two years, the team has gone from strength to strength and now with the pharmacist, six to eight ACTs and 10 to 12 dispensers it is a large pharmacy team.

Knights Pharmacy uses technology to implement better stock management across the chain which has in turn improved its overall offering to patients. An IT functionality has enabled the group to redistribute stock that would have been unavailable from wholesale due to recent shortages and led to preventing customers from receiving their required medication. Pharmacy teams across the chain are motivated by knowing that their excess stock is being put to good use by other colleagues.

For her patients, Pooja Kashyap believes she is their local healthcare advisor and clinical pharmacist –which admittedly is far more than just dispensing medication. In addition to offering multiple private PGDs for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, UTI, sore throat, she provides services around weight loss and smoking cessation to the local community to support healthy lifestyles. Pooja managed to forge stronger ties with her local surgery team which has meant better appreciation of each other’s work.

Pharmacist Reena Barai realised quite early on the impact Covid-19 was going to have on community pharmacy. Her post on social media with a list of action points for community pharmacy – in the absence of official guidance on how to prepare for the pandemic – went viral and paved the way for many businesses to invest in protective screens and social distancing measures which later. became the norm across the sector.

During recent months, consultations in Sturdee Avenue Pharmacy have been moved online. The pharmacist would conduct full risk assessments remotely – by sending patient pre-assessment forms through a software and then conducting a risk assessment via video link through the same software.

This would ensure the patients’ contact with the pharmacy would be brief, and all paperwork was stored digitally. became the norm across the sector.

Regent decided to move to a non-medical prescribing (NMP) model four years ago, which has led to the pharmacy offering many more new services in recent years. The pharmacy now offers a private clinic with online appointments where clients can obtain a consultation for £15 plus the cost of the medication.

Delivering over 500 NHS Health Checks in 10 months is no mean achievement. In addition to managing all those bookings, Sylwia link sells from one member of a household to another. A key member of the pharmacy, she has also taken a leading role in the Healthy Living Pharmacy project and ensures the ‘advice wall’ of the pharmacy is always up to date.

This independent family run community pharmacy is a great example of how adaptation of technology can completely transform a pharmacy's day-to-day operations. Pharmacist owner Suketu Patel sums up: "Anything that saves time will generate profit and I’ve made more time as a pharmacist through automating as many tasks as possible which in turn frees up my time to provide more services."