Ten days before the start date
The home sends its order. Some residents are with one surgery, some with another. The requests go off, and the prescriptions start to come back through EPS over the next week or so. Some arrive quickly. Some are missing an item. Some come back with a different strength from last month.
Somebody at the pharmacy is trying to hold the whole picture: which residents are complete, which are waiting, which surgery needs a call. The picture lives on printouts with highlighter pen. As the start date gets close, the calls get more urgent and the home rings to ask whether everything will be ready.
Why the cycle turns into a chase
The order is created at the home, approved at the surgeries and fulfilled at the pharmacy. Each party sees only their part. The pharmacy is the one place where all the pieces come together, but only if someone matches every returning prescription against the original order.
That matching is done by hand. With a few homes and dozens of residents each, it becomes a job for one experienced person, and when they are off, the picture goes with them.
What the chase costs
| Symptom | Cost |
|---|---|
| Missing items found late | Urgent calls to surgeries in the last days of the cycle |
| Changes spotted late | Rework on items already dispensed |
| Home keeps calling | Staff time spent giving updates by phone |
| Knowledge in one head | Holiday cover is stressful and error-prone |
| No history | You cannot show a home or surgery where delays usually happen |
A cycle tracker built around each home
- Order capture. Each home's order is entered or imported once, from a spreadsheet, a form we give the home, or the ordering tool they already use where it exports.
- Resident and item list for the cycle, grouped by surgery.
- Prescription matching. As prescriptions come in, each item is ticked off against the order, from the PMR's data where available or by a scan at the point of receipt.
- Gap list by surgery, updated daily, showing what is still missing, how long it has been requested for, and what has arrived with a difference from the order.
- Chase log for calls and emails to surgeries, so the next person can see what was already asked.
- A home view, optional, that you can share with the care home so they can see progress without phoning.
Anything that looks different from last month is flagged for the pharmacist's attention, not resolved by the system.
A cycle you can see
Five days before the start date, you know exactly which items are outstanding and at which surgery. The chasing happens earlier and more calmly. The home can see progress. The team member who normally runs care homes can take a week off without the cycle falling apart.
After a few months, the history shows which surgeries usually cause delays and which homes send late orders, which gives you something concrete to discuss with them.
Is your care home cycle like this?
- Care home orders are tracked on printouts with highlighter
- Missing items are found in the last few days of the cycle
- One person holds the whole picture for each home
- Homes phone regularly to ask about progress
- Surgeries are chased more than once for the same item because nobody logged the first call