MWI Pharmacy - A day in the life
By MWI Animal Health
MWI Home Pharmacy is a new service offering to our customers, we spoke to Superintendent Pharmacist, Greg Hyde about his role, setting up the pharmacy and a typical day at MWI Animal Health.
About Greg
I’m a registered pharmacist with the General Pharmaceutical Council of Great Britain (GPhC) and a member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPharmS). I’ve been practicing for over 35 years, and I’ve held positions in community pharmacy serving the public directly and other support roles such as Clinical Governance Manager for a large national multiple responsible for a variety of teams including those dealing with Dispensing Incidents, complaints, Controlled Drugs.
I’ve also been involved in the setting up and administration of advanced integrated dispensing solutions now used in human health to provide a direct to home distribution service, used to free up time for pharmacists to provide better and more varied clinical services directly to the patient in a clinical healthcare setting. I have experience of both clinical roles and wider regulatory and governance roles, dealing with both members of the public and the various regulators within the industry.
At MWI, I’m responsible for:
- The registration of the pharmacy with our governing body (GPhC)
- Meeting and exceeding regulatory standards set by GPhC, VMD and MHRA
- All clinical governance matters
- All operational processes within the pharmacy
- Managing the pharmacy team, including recruitment, and ensuring that registrations are applicable and up to date
I’m also responsible for ensuring the service we provide meets the needs of our customers, their clients and ultimately the animals in their care.
A typical day at MWI
Daily, I manage the team responsible for the clinical side of this process, carrying out tasks such as:
- Clinically check all prescriptions, ensuring product and dose reflect the animal for whom the prescription is for
- Obtaining stock from our distribution centres to be able to fulfil prescriptions
- Labelling and dispensing medication against the prescription
- Carrying out an accuracy checks prior to packaging (note only qualified and validated Accuracy Checkers can perform this role within a pharmacy)
- Package and ensure postal solution used is correctly updated
- Dispatch product and ensure that information passed to our finance teams allows accurate and timely invoicing of service provided
- Administration – dealing with emails, answering queries, chasing stock, meetings, talking to regulators and providing advice where required
Essentially, we’re doing everything that a veterinary surgeon and their team would be completing in a practice, but by taking this relatively mundane task out of the clinical setting we are literally saving the practice hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds every year which can then be spent on “hands on” rewarding clinical care.
About MWI Pharmacy
We’ve established a pharmacy within our Stoke Distribution Centre, and I’ve spent the last 2 years working with some wonderful, clever, and creative people to develop and build an integrated solution which can really assist hard pressed veterinary teams in practice.
We’ve aimed to do this by removing some of the burden involved in dealing with pet healthcare plans for example stock inventories (ordering, date checking, cleaning and maintaining), dispensing (physically labelling and checking) and through reduced footfall in the practice with professional staff tied up simply handing out products.
There is the added benefit for the practice of reduced stockholding, therefore improving cash flow and financial loss caused through writing off damaged or out of date stock.
This also improves convenience for the pet owner as they can have their subscription pet healthcare plan products delivered directly through their door, reducing the need for visits to the vet to collect flea and wormer products.
Planning for the future
We’re also in a process of continual improvement and growth, reviewing our premises and ensuring they meet all the required regulatory standards as we scale up the offering.
We’re increasing the number of integration partners we work with to give clinical practitioners more choice and ability to access this service, to really support and service as many customers as we possibly can to let them do what they are best at as veterinary surgeons.
