Taking care of your pharmacy space can make a big difference to your financial success in the long-term. Our team has often talked with pharmacy owners who wanted to renovate their property — but when we looked inside their stores, all they needed was a little cleanup. By proactively taking care of your pharmacy space, you can ensure both happy employees and happy customers.
The team at O’Connell Store Fixtures has written this blog to provide pharmacy owners with a few tips for making the most of their pharmacy space. Let us know if you found it helpful and leave a comment below!
Budget for Housekeeping
Save some of your budget for housekeeping! It’s unlikely that your staff will want to do housekeeping, in addition to their regular duties, but you need someone to do it. Like any business, clutter will pile up. This clutter will affect your employee’s workflow and create a negative impression for customers. What’s the solution? Hire someone to come in and clean on a regular basis.
Organize Your Pharmacy Storage Spaces
Based on our experience, it is rare that pharmacies suffer from a lack of storage space. What tends to be the issue is how they are organizing their materials. Implementing a proper storage system can go a long way. Your employees should be able to find products easily, which means ensuring items are always being stored in the same place.
The average pharmacy will carry both pharmaceuticals and retail merchandise. Both will need to be stored separately and, in the case of pharmaceuticals, there may be stringent conditions around how you should be storing them. Develop a system that accommodates both.
Develop a Filing System for Prescription Pick-Ups
Building on the above tips, one of the main items that generates clutter in a pharmacy are the prescription pick-ups (or ‘will calls’). Ensure you have sufficient capacity to store the volume of prescriptions that you will be serving.
What’s the solution? Train employees to file paperwork properly and develop an internal system for dealing with prescriptions. Be proactive about getting rid of old paperwork too. Get a recycle bin and a shredder to dispose of confidential information. Make sure you incorporate this into your pharmacy design.
Create a Maintenance Policy
Most pharmacies will have an operating policy in place, but we rarely see owners with an ongoing maintenance policy. Without a maintenance policy, it can be very easy for dirt or messes to spread unchecked. As we explained above, few employees will take on housekeeping duties on their own initiative — a maintenance policy is one way to formalize these duties for your pharmacy team.
Arrange Your Pharmacy Shelving
Instead of just sticking products on the shelves when you re-stock them, make an effort to arrange your merchandise to use space efficiently and cater to your customer’s needs. Could you fit extra products somewhere? Are your top sellers easy to find? Find spaces for improvement and consider hiring a merchandiser.
Overall, the best way to approach pharmacy improvements is to find ways to change your pharmacy’s interior design without investing unnecessarily! It may be that after following the 5 tips above, you still need a renovation! In that case, we’d encourage you to contact the team at O’Connell Store Fixtures in Ontario — who knows? We may be able to help you find other, less costly ways to improve your pharmacy space.
You can click here to learn more about our Renovation services.
