Through my experience working at lots of different pharmacies it seems that every store has their different unique ways of maximising revenue. Here are a few to start it off...

1) Locum pharmacists like convenience. We have Actavis Trimethorpim 200mg 6 packs on our shelves, looking at the pricing it costs us 45p to obtain these whereas the 14 tablet packs cost 18p! It would be better to get the locum to give out the 14's than the 6's and tell the patient to throw away the excess! To ensure the locum does not do this I had our pharmacy assistant make boxes of 6 from the boxes of 14 and add appropriate exp date and product name.

2) Undercutting is not always the best way. If you go to Boots they charge 20p for 32 paracetamol and 35p for ibuprofen tablets. There is no way an independent pharmacy can complete with this unless they own their own factory. It is better to rely on the patients need for convenience and increase prices to £1 for paracetamol and £1.50 for ibuprofen. Obviously, it depends on where the pharmacy is located and who their competitors are but in general patients are willing to pay for this convenience. We had a patient come in once who wanted to returns a double pack of pregnancy tests as she had found you can buy 5 for one pound at the local pound store. I said this was fine, but asked whether she really trusted the result and she changed her mind!

3) Buying from China. This sounds very tricky, but it is extremely easy. Sites like DHGate work like eBay for factories in China, you can browse their products, make a purchase and they will arrive in shop in about 2 weeks. The advantage of this is that you can source relatively cheap, high quality products which other pharmacies and shops cannot get from their usual wholesaler. Examples of products which we have sourced include Blood Pressure monitors for £2 and alcohol breath analysers for £5. The obvious retort to this is whether the quality would be good enough for the UK market. The answer to this is that most of the factories offer samples. If you contact them direct and say you will be willing to place an order for 50+ they will be more than happy to send you a sample.

4) Internet visibility. This is excpetionaly important in todays extremely web savvy world. Quiet a few pharmacies that I visit as a locum are invisible on Google maps. This is appaling. It takes 10 minutes to make sure that you are visible on Google maps, all you need to do is type the pharmacy name into google maps and then click on the link saying "are you the owner". Just enter your details including opening hours and contact phone numbers and you are done!

I was working this Saturday when an elderly lady presented herself with a prescription for:

Hi Guys,

Don't forget that there's a section on requirements for CD scripts in the BNF, and as far as I know, you're still allowed to make relevant pencil annotations in the text, so what you can do is go through and annotate the entry for each CD with little abbreviations for the requirements.

eg.

"MST Continus - CD2 Rx reqs, 28d, S Cus, Regis, ExpLic, ReqNec, Denat, PrRxFrm"

This would mean that MST Continus, a schedule 2 CD, must conform to the prescription writing requirements, the prescription is valid for 28 days, it requires safe custody, the register requirements must be met, a licence is required for export and import, a requisition is required to make a supply, it must be denatured before disposal and private scripts must be on a standardised form.

Obviously you can use whatever abbreviations you want, and you can write some little reminder notes on register keeping etc if you do it in the right place and keep it abbreviated and succinct.

This can also be extended to the prescription charges questions. Before the exam, look up the number of charges in the tariff for various items (HRT, dressing kits etc) and mark the number of charges in pencil next to the item in the BNF.

Of course, its better that you learn all this stuff, but in the stress of the exam, having a wee reminder is always handy.

As there have been a lot of changes for the 2012 GPhC exam we have updated all of our Posted Mock Exams to resemble as close as possible to the new exam format as possible.