This month we spoke with Kelvin Lee, pharmacist and proprietor of Chemist Discount Centre Parkhill at Berwick in south-eastern Melbourne, about the pharmacy, his career highlights, the industry’s evolution over recent years, overcoming pandemic challenges and more.
What kind of customers does your pharmacy attract?
With our discount model, we attract patients of all ages with a broad range of acute and chronic illnesses, who are seeking great service and advice from our knowledgeable pharmacy team, added to the accessible prices on our products.
Tell us about the ethos of your pharmacy and how it differs from other pharmacies in your view.
At Chemist Discount Centre Parkhill, our motto is to be ‘brilliant at the basics’.
We may not offer a unique or niche-clinic offering within the pharmacy, but we’re proud to be providing a comprehensive range of programs and services that the community needs. This includes vaccination services, medication reviews and HMRs, dose administration aids, nursing home services, home deliveries, NDSS program, pharmacotherapy program, and quarterly health promotional activities as part of the Chemist Discount Centre offering.
We’re innovative, passionate, but also very practical, which stems from a genuine customer-centric mindset. We always think about our business from the patient perspective, being both mindful of and sensitive to different cultural nuances in improving community healthcare outcomes.
Our team is committed to consistently deliver quality service and advice, while focusing on all the ‘basics’ that a community pharmacy should be great at.
Describe your day-to-day challenges and how you overcome them.
Many pharmacies now are probably faced with very similar challenges: lack of staff and burnouts. Other than the obvious solution through active recruitment, we also maximise efficiencies through the use of our Buy-IT-Right automated inventory management system, so we’re not having to execute manual repetitive tasks, and have more time to spend with our patients.
What are your values at the pharmacy and why is it so important to maintain core values in community pharmacy?
We’re extremely proud to be a discount pharmacy. We discount our products, but not our service.
This value enables us to stay true to what we believe in, and continue to provide accessible medicines and other health products, assisted by our knowledgeable team members.
It’s important to maintain this core value so that we don’t ever compromise on delivering quality advice and providing comprehensive healthcare services for our community.
Does your pharmacy offer professional services?
Yes, ranging from vaccination services, medication reviews, dose administration aids, home deliveries, NDSS program, and quarterly health promotional activities as part of the Chemist Discount Centre offering.
What is the most successful OTC category in your pharmacy and why?
Vitamins and supplements are our biggest category. In recent years, people are certainly more health conscious, and through our discount retail offering we have the breadth and depth of range in this category, which has added to the success.
Why is looking after your community so important to your pharmacy? What do think your customer base values the most about your pharmacy?
As a discount model, I believe we straddle the intersection of value and improved community healthcare outcomes, which are inextricably linked in our Chemist Discount Centre business model.
The value piece is critical in our multicultural community. Our pricing strategy makes healthcare more accessible to our community and is backed up with professional advice and a multilingual team to dispel any stigma and encourage the health and wellbeing of our patients. As such, we’re part of the fabric of our community where trust is valued above all else.
What has been the impact of technology on pharmacy over recent years?
With the pandemic, consumer behaviour has changed dramatically. Contactless or paperless systems are now the norm, and pharmacies have had to keep up with the changing environment. It’s actually been a blessing in disguise, as automation and technology are things that I’m passionate about.
Firstly, in a highly competitive discount environment, efficiencies and automation are key to ensuring our business viability. Our pharmacy is powered by an automated inventory management system, Buy-IT-Right.
- It calculates our entire pharmacy’s orders daily, based on forecast.
- It automates the order submission to relevant suppliers and wholesalers when the minimum order requirements have been achieved.
- It also automates the ‘transfer’ of forecast to equivalent products when stock availability is uncertain, and the ‘receipt’ of order invoices and stock-on-hand updates.
- It executes our CDC brand pricing, and links all our ranged products on planogram with the ordering, invoicing and ticketing functionalities.
Automation also frees up our team to be available and present for our patients, instead of executing repetitive tasks manually.
Secondly, multichannel touchpoints and ease of online engagement with consumers are fast becoming an expectation. Therefore, investing in an online presence is key – through e-commerce technology and social media platforms.
At Chemist Discount Centre Parkhill, we implemented our click-and-collect and click-and-deliver technology at the beginning of the pandemic to cater for consumers wanting that seamless online experience.
Additionally, we leveraged our other digital channels to regularly communicate with our loyalty customers, mobile app customers, and social media followers. This provided members of our community to be ‘kept in the loop’ through whichever channel of communications they feel most comfortable with – through technology.
How did the pandemic most change the way your pharmacy operates?
During Covid, we knew we had to uphold our standards of primary care services and remain accessible to members of the community. Our patients still needed their regular support and to feel safe coming into the pharmacy for their medication and advice.
To assist our team in meeting the evolving needs of the community, particularly in the pandemic environment, we ensured that we maximised all the resources available at our disposal. We focused on improving our operational efficiencies, as so many people in the community were reliant on our Covid vaccination services during the peak of the pandemic and we needed to ensure we had the capacity to cater for them.
We tapped into the available resources from Chemist Discount Centre and tailored our own triage system for our Covid vaccination service. This involved a structured patient flow in and out of the pharmacy, with specific points clearly designated by signage and decals, directed by a designated vaccination marshal.
Patients were also encouraged to access our contactless services online, reducing paperwork and physical contact. This enabled us to keep our staff and our community safe, as well as provide a seamless patient experience.
As our Covid vaccination services ramped up and different vaccines became available, we implemented a colour-coded system to assist the vaccinating pharmacist and improve the patient experience. We matched the colour of the cards that patients were given on registration with the vaccine labels to minimise errors and ensured that our vaccinating pharmacists were equipped with all the operational training and patient resources at all times.
From this experience, we’ve learnt that there are many ways in which we can bring more operational efficiencies and apply the concepts to other services.
How has your team performed during the challenges of the past 18-plus months – in terms of product shortages, frustrated customers, rosters, vaccines, etc?
Although we weren’t exempt from these challenges that many other pharmacies faced, we were very fortunate that we had the automated systems in place as part of the Chemist Discount Centre brand offer, and therefore product ordering and, to some extent, product shortages, didn’t affect us to a great extent.
Additionally, we were well supported with further technological advancements, such as the e-commerce platform and extensive digital presence, which combatted a lot of the communication issues because we were able to continuously update our customers through various means.
The rapid changes in policies, the introduction of various Covid-19 vaccines into the market, as well as the many updates regarding vaccine availability, however, were quite difficult for us to keep up with. Again, we were very fortunate that we had comprehensive support from the Chemist Discount Centre teams through timely summary updates and operational guides, but our pharmacy teams still had to ensure they were across the information and comfortable with assisting patients in the community with the right advice.
I’m very proud of our Chemist Discount Centre Parkhill team, especially for all the things they’ve achieved throughout the pandemic and for staying resilient in supporting our local community.
This feature was originally published in the October issue of Retail Pharmacy.
