To understand this it is important to understand the commercial and political environment in which pharmacies operate today. Like any industry or business facing a competitive challenge, we can either hope that everything will turn out all right, or we can actively plan to make sure it does. There is a saying in business - "If you don’t plan your future, someone else will". The Quality Care Pharmacy Program is an important first step in ensuring that Community Pharmacy will control its own future.

By focussing the pharmacy and its staff on the factors that customers value – things like service, advice, convenience, information and so on – you will give your customers a reason to choose your pharmacy over the local supermarket, health-food shop, discount store, hair-care specialist or similar competitor.

With pharmacies all over Australia following the same fundamentals, we give the public and governments a clearer vision of the value that Community Pharmacy provides – things that our competitors cannot or will not provide.

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The first thing you should do is appoint a member of staff as your QCPP coordinator. Have this person read the Standards Implementation Guide. The staff should then make a time to view the AIPM Implementation Video to talk about the various roles that each will play over next few months.

Here are 10 simple steps to help you towards accreditation:

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When implemented in pharmacies across Australia, QCPP will achieve a uniformly higher standard of service to customers, ensure a guaranteed level of professional care to patients, build morale among staff, and provide a clear performance benchmark for the industry of community pharmacy. Proprietors of pharmacies that have gained accreditation attest to the improved performance of the pharmacy in delivering:

• Consistently high levels of service to pharmacy customers
• Staff empowerment
• Higher levels of productivity
• Improvement in business management as a result of properly documented processes; and
• Higher levels of customer satisfaction in the quality of services that the pharmacy delivers

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You and your staff work at your own pace. Some pharmacies will take longer than others, for reasons such as:

• more staff members to train and accredit;
• more part-time or casual staff (ie fewer opportunities to train and accredit);
• fewer procedures already in place in the pharmacy;
• absence of key personnel due to illness, leave etc.;
• diversionary issues popping up in the pharmacy (eg renovations, stocktaking etc.); and
• simply not putting as much effort into the process as other pharmacies.

On average, it will probably take around three months to complete the process. Some extremely well-organised pharmacies may be ready in half that time. Consultants are also available on a fee-for-service basis to assist you to implement the Program – completion time may vary depending on the service offered.

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The Program has not been designed to directly boost sales or profits. It does, however, focus on creating the conditions that make it more likely that customers will come to you, find the products they want when at your pharmacy, and keep coming back over the long term. It also contains a number of elements related to obtaining and keeping good staff, keeping these staff focussed and motivated, and avoiding losses where possible.

So, we believe the Program will make an impact on your bottom line. How much of an impact will depend on a range of factors, including how the business operated before the Program was put into place, and how effective you are in ensuring the Standards are maintained in the pharmacy.

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What if my Retails Brand group has its own Standards/Tools?

The major pharmacy Retail Brands have seen all the materials, and have indicated they don’t see any conflict with their processes. In relation to Standards, some groups may have Standards that exceed those of this Program, or additional Standards for areas not covered by this Program. That is a matter for the groups and their members, and has no impact on Pharmacy Accreditation – which relates only to compliance with the Quality Care Pharmacy Standards.

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How does QCPP reflect on me as a member of a Retails Brand Group?

Your Retail Brand Group along with the pharmaceutical industry has supported QCPP since its inception and has been directly involved in its development. Since 1998, QCPP has become an important vehicle for industry quality assurance regulation, ensuring that pharmacy is ready to meet the future challenges facing the health industry in Australia.  From the beginning, QCPP has enjoyed industry-wide support from stakeholders including your Retail Brand, wholesalers, State and Territory Pharmacy Boards, national professional bodies, and the Federal Government.

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How does The Quality Care Pharmacy Program differ from other Quality Assurance programs?

Both have the same aim – delivery of a consistently high quality of service – but take different approaches. Quality Assurance concentrates on the process, and assumes that if a suitable documented process exists then quality must follow. For example, if you have a documented process for dispensing, and everyone knows the process, then you are deemed to be dispensing to an acceptable standard of quality. To this extent the QCPP is a QA program that is industry specific, rather than a general QA program that might apply across industries.

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If you want to be part of the Quality Care Pharmacy network, and use and display the associated logo, you will need to gain Pharmacy Accreditation under our Program.

If your pharmacy is already accredited under ISO 9002, you should find it comparatively easy to pass the Pharmacy Accreditation assessment compared to a pharmacy with no background in this area. However, no exemptions are granted because of existing Quality Assurance accreditation.

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We believe that the Quality Care Pharmacy logo will come to perform a similar function to the logo used by Certified Practising Accountants. That is, some people (perhaps many people) will attach a value to a pharmacy meeting certain Standards, and will actively seek out such a pharmacy.

This will only happen if pharmacies that display the logo actually live up to the promise it makes. If your pharmacy has paid its money and gone to the trouble of gaining accreditation and is maintaining the Standards, you would be understandably annoyed if other pharmacies de-valued the logo by failing to meet the Standards after accreditation.

This is why we think some form of ongoing monitoring is essential. However, we are not interested in spying on you or your business. What we are interested in is making sure the logo continues to have value for all accredited pharmacies.

The Guild is committed to maintaining the integrity of the Program. Testing of the compliance to the Program will be done via Standards Maintenence Assessment visits, which will include a mystery shopper element. This will help to ensure the high levels of the Program are maintained.

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Some disruption is unavoidable, as the assessor will need to speak to the proprietor/manager and staff, view certain documentation and see the pharmacy staff in action with customers. Disruption will be kept to a minimum, but you should ensure your pharmacy is sufficiently staffed on the day of the assessment. This should include ’buffer staffing’ to take into account the fact that pharmacists and staff will need to spend some time with the assessor instead of on their normal duties.

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Will I be charged for phone advice?

There is a local call charge for the 1300 number.

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That depends on how effectively you work, and how long each meeting lasts. As a guideline, we think it will take something like 10-15 hours to work through the Team Standards in the depth required. We would recommend that any meetings be at least 30 minutes, but not more than 2 hours, in length.

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The Program does not make any specific distinction between staff levels, other than the owner or managing pharmacist and ‘Pharmacy Staff’ (everyone else, including dispensary assistants and other pharmacists). Thus everyone in the pharmacy other than the proprietor/manager, or his/her locum, must be certified using the Team Standards and Staff Member Certification Workbook.

Since, however, the Pharmacy Standards deal with a number of elements of professional service, any person working in the dispensary will need to be aware of and follow the requirements of any relevant Pharmacy Standards in this area. This will, of course be a factor in the Pharmacist-in-Charge's decision that a Pharmacy Standard has been achieved, and will ultimately be subject to external assessment.

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If a Team Standard, or aspects of it, only concerns certain staff, make that clear in the Staff Certification Workbook for each staff member.

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What if I (the proprietor/manager) do not sign off all of the Pharmacy Standards?

You need to ensure that sufficient Pharmacy Standards are signed off to meet the minimum requirements of the Program, so you may decide that some Standards are not applicable.

As a minimum, all mandatory Standards need to be signed off as fully met, and sufficient of the other Standards need to be signed off as fully met to meet the minimum compliance requirements of 80%. More details on the marking rules are provided in the document called Assessment Methodology for Licensed Assessors.

However, the Guild encourages pharmacies to implement all of the Pharmacy Standards as soon as is practicable.

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Yes. But the $2500 registration incentive closed on 31 October 2001 and no longer applies.

The $7500 accreditation incentive is available until the end of 2003. However, from 1 January 2004 this amount will be reduced to $3000. The $7500 accreditation incentive is available once only and is paid to the proprietor at the time the pharmacy is accredited. If the accredited pharmacy is sold and the $7,500 has already been paid to the former proprietor, a $2,500 re-assessment incentive becomes available to the new proprietor. 

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Yes. On the anniversary of its accreditation, each pharmacy must conduct a self-assessment to ensure that the Standards are still being maintained. This is a fairly simple procedure and can be completed by the Proprietor or Manager. Also, a pharmacy must be re-accredited three years after its initial and subsequent assessments. Like the first assessment, the re-accreditation assessment is conducted by an external assessor.

While the Quality Care Pharmacy Program provides a solid platform for success, it is also inevitable that customer needs and expectations, and the competitive environment, will change over time. And almost certainly, customer expectations will get higher, and the business environment will become more challenging. You will be expected to modify your QCPP standards over time to suit this changing environment. This process is called Continuous Quality Improvement.

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Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a broad business/management term, generally used to describe the process of systematically reviewing and improving existing operational processes.

When we use the term CQI in relation to the Quality Care Pharmacy Program, however, we apply a more Community Pharmacy focussed definition:

"CQI describes the process of demonstrating a commitment to the ongoing improvement of customer outcomes and business profitability, through the systematic review and enhancement of the pharmacy’s Quality Care Pharmacy Program standards, and their continuous improvement over time"

Some of the key things to note about this definition are:

• CQI is a systematic process – best results will be achieved through a disciplined and ongoing approach, rather than an unplanned, ad-hoc or reactive approach.

• CQI is about ongoing improvement – it isn’t something you can do once and then safely forget about

• The focus is on customer outcomes and business profitability – when you get right down to it, these are the core issues for any business. If what you are doing isn’t contributing directly to one or both of these factors, you should be asking yourself why you are doing it at all.

The Quality Care Pharmacy Program provides the starting point – QCPP doesn’t pretend to cover every aspect of pharmacy operations, and you should always be thinking about what you can do to improve these other aspects of the business. For the purpose of maintaining QCPP accreditation however, you will be asked to undertake some CQI initiatives that clearly represent an improvement or extension to the existing Program in your pharmacy.

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Even the best operators will benefit from this Program. First of all, the best operators would suffer along with everybody else if the Federal Government decided that Community Pharmacy as an industry was not performing to a level that justified maintaining the current structure of pharmacy ownership. We think that a widely accepted, uniform set of performance Standards is essential to maintaining the current structure.

Secondly, experience from the pilot, and from other industries that have used this methodology, shows that even the best operators find value in either the Standards themselves or the delivery mechanisms that support them (eg the support tools etc.). Perhaps you have most of the Quality Care Pharmacy Standards in place already, but we would be fairly confident that you won’t have all of them in place.

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Get with the program. The Quality Care Pharmacy Program