Through focused work, benchmarking and strategic planning facilitated by Rachel Dungan, CEO of 4Front Pharmacy and the company-wide application of the 4Front Pharmacy Online Training Programme, we have made significant changes in all areas of our pharmacy business in the last year.  My pharmacist leadership team and I are now all unified behind a compelling business vision and values and have created key performance measures for each of our core performance areas.   I have stepped up into my role as CEO significantly, up-grading our entire team’s knowledge and skills so we can better share the workload and deliver an exceptional service for our customers. As a result, the group turnover has hit its target of 10% growth over the past year, AND we have created a whole new employee development system that sets us up for exponential growth in the coming year.

‘We added a new pharmacy to our group recently.  The OTC staff had zero formal training and the technicians had received zero training since their graduation.  Before using 4FrontPharmacy.ie, we would have been waiting for months, even years to ensure all staff had completed face to face training.  Now, we can get their training started instantly, and enable them to integrate with our existing company training and development program.  This has helped raise the quality of service, and smooth the integration of new staff into our company culture’.

‘I have calculated the time and money I have saved by leveraging the power of technology. In our case, it turns out that the course fee is less than 1/3 of the true cost of off-site training, when you take into account travel, subsistence, payment of staff wages for the day’s training, payment of wages to cover the staff member’s customer service hours on the store floor etc. Now, 100% of training time is spent on actual training, rather than travel, subsistence, and the staff get to implement their learning immediately’.

‘We have tried building and creating content for our own online learning and development platform for a number of years.  We even partnered with a digital company which has expertise in the L&D field, but no specialist pharmacy knowledge.  We discovered, to our cost, that consistently creating and quality assuring engaging, relevant content is extremely costly and resource intensive.  While reviewing our strategic plan, we realised that our expertise is in community pharmacy, not online programme development.  Therefore our strategy has shifted to focus our limited resources on enhancing the customer experience.  Instead of creating in-house online training, we have outsourced this function to 4Front Pharmacy.ie as it provides a high quality, turn-key, online training solution, designed by pharmacists, specifically for pharmacy teams’.

‘Our people are our product. It has always worried me that our part-time staff members are less safe and less responsive to the needs of our patients than our better trained full-time staff. 4Front Pharmacy brings equality to our training model, as every member of staff, irrespective of how many hours they work each week, has equal access to online training. I cannot tell you how much this means to me as superintendent pharmacist’.

‘I love that at a click of a button, I can keep track of all my staff’s training as it is my responsibility to ensure they are trained to a consistently high standard.  From a patient safety, regulatory compliance and risk reduction point of view, it ticks all the boxes.’

‘Any live training is at least a 2hr drive away.  The headache of trying to get cover for off-site staff training is almost gone thanks to the convenient, instant online access to the video training modules’.