Pharmaseekers improve locum search

Darwen based locum pharmacists Pharmaseekers have benefited from advice and financial support from the Digital Development Unit in automating their core business.

Established in 2002, Pharmaseekers Ltd. provide locum pharmacists to community pharmacies. They have about 400 locums on their books and bookings are in the order of 1,000 per month covering some 10 major customers including Boots, Lloyds, United Co-op and ASDA and several hundred independents. Their main territory is the North West however they are now beginning to offer the service into Yorkshire and the North East of England.

A series of ‘fireside’ or focussed micro-consultancy sessions with DDU advisors established the priority for improving the business process and how this could be achieved. The workshops also identified a core business bottleneck in the Pharmaseekers search service; searching for a locum to service a particular job placement was undertaken manually. This was a time consuming process; not only do they have to check that the locum fits the criteria laid down by the customer but they need to establish if the locum is free to take up the vacancy. The average time per search is about 3 hours. It was thought this could be substantially reduced by automation. It was agreed that it would be this part of the process that would provide the best return for improvement and investment.

The directors researched the market and found that the best fit to their requirements and best value for money was the creation of a database driven tool proposed by a local expert supplier. Working with this supplier, Pharmaseekers produced a requirement specification for the work to be done which would reduce the locum search down to around 10 seconds. A dynamic database solution was commissioned and developed from this requirements specification and it is planned that the benefits from DDU financial support for this project will include: a significant reduction in the time taken to process a customer requirement, more bookings, the production of activity reports, faster processing of locum applications, an increase in sales and the safeguarding of jobs.