Employee retention is a persistent challenge impacting many industries, including pharmacy. High staff turnover in pharmacies can have numerous negative consequences. It can overwhelm employees, compound stress, and contribute to burnout. It creates instability and confusion, making it more difficult to get new employees up to speed. It can also decrease morale and cause an increase in mistakes and medication errors due to a lack of training, process, and continuity. 

The good news: there are solutions available to help pharmacies keep employees happy and engaged. Providing staff with tools and technology like Pharmapod can help improve pharmacy safety, provide consistency, enhance collaboration, and most importantly, help staff work more efficiently. Here are seven ways that Pharmapod can help improve staff retention in your pharmacy.

1. Physical and Psychological Safety – Just Culture

Pharmapod helps support a ‘Just Culture’ where employees feel safe and comfortable reporting unsafe situations and medication errors without fear of consequences or retribution. Mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, where the focus is on finding and fixing what went wrong in the process to result in an error or near-miss, rather than shaming or blaming individuals for making honest mistakes.  

2. Meaning and Purpose

The need for meaning and purpose are defining human characteristics, and employees often need both to feel a sense of accomplishment. When reporting medication errors and near-miss events, Pharmapod offers employees a clear line of sight from reporting to actions necessary for improvements. Knowing their efforts directly impact patient safety initiatives can help enhance morale and improve job satisfaction.

3. Camaraderie and Teamwork

Staff working together toward something meaningful — improving patient safety — fosters a culture of teamwork and collaboration. When safety issues are uncovered, employees join forces to problem-solve and make improvements.  This sense of camaraderie and mutual support can positively impact morale and job satisfaction.

4. Recognition and Rewards

Pharmapod provides regular, meaningful recognition of employee contributions to safety and celebrates outcomes in the Staff Insights, Action Insights and Learning Points modules. 

Recognizing staff’s hard work and dedication helps employees feel valued, supported by their workplace, and motivated to continue working hard. Studies have shown that when employees feel appreciated by their employer, they are more productive, loyal, and less likely to leave. 

5. Participative Management

Pharmapod creates an open line of communication between pharmacy staff and management, enabling leaders to listen to staff input when implementing new processes, procedures or policies. 

6. Daily Improvement

Every reported incident creates a learning opportunity for the pharmacy team, which fosters a culture of improvement. Pharmapod’s Root Cause Analysis and Actions functions make it easy to review data, pinpoint process gaps, and proactively test and implement improvements. When staff can actually see the impact of their work, they’re inspired to look for additional areas improvements can be made every day. 

7. Enhanced Efficiency

High workloads and inefficient processes are leading causes of employee burnout. Pharmapod simplifies tedious administrative work, giving staff more time to focus on providing patient care. The platform keeps all medication incident data in one place, eliminating time wasted searching for lost or misplaced reports. The medication error form walks users through pre-defined questions ensuring all relevant information is captured so staff know exactly what is required when reporting an incident. Employees can save incident reports and work on them throughout the day as they have time. Plus – real-time dashboards with auto-generated graphs and charts simplify reporting and make it easy to learn from data and share critical information across the organization. 

Related: Discover how Pharmapod helped Meaghers Pharmacy enhance efficiency and establish a culture of safety. Read the case study.

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Ready to learn more about how Pharmapod can help minimize employee turnover in your pharmacy? Contact us today for your personalized demo.