A pharmacy is reliant on patients because they are the backbone of its business but it won’t have any unless there are excellent patient relationships in place. But many pharmacists forget this, as well as the basic rules of human interaction.
Remember, if you have excellent patient relationships, you’ll likely have customers for life. Here’s how to cultivate top-notch patient relationships:
1. Greet patients as soon as they come into your store or your pharmacy department and use their last name if possible. This makes them feel valued.
2. Be formal until the patient gives you an indication otherwise. Use last names unless they tell you not to. This ensures you and your pharmacy are viewed as professional.
3. At the same time, be caring. Bedside manner has largely disappeared these days, but if you can exhibit some of it in your pharmacy, the patient will feel cared for and want to return.
4. It’s simple: Be happy, advises Stanley George, a licensed pharmacist in New York City. “Always make direct eye contact and smile as much as you can.”
5. Try to get to know your customers on an individual basis. “If you can’t remember their name, remember their face and greet them like you do remember their name,” recommends George.
6. Don’t spend time in idle chit-chat, says Ernie Gates, president of Gates Healthcare Associates, a pharmaceutical and healthcare consulting firm. “Being friendly is not a bad thing for anyone but not the time when you have other details to check,” he points out. “It can come at the end of your time together, if necessary, but you have other important stuff to verify. Side talk can deter from the patient and everything is about the patient.”
7. Take time to talk to the patients and explain their medications. “The patient wants to feel confidence in the pharmacy that they’re going to get the right medication and the right information on how to take it,” explains Gates. “The pharmacist can help the patient understand things, such as if there is an interaction between drugs.”
8. Don’t ever let patients think you are rushed. “Spending time with the patients and explaining their medication should be your highest priority,” says Gates. “Patients shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions.”
9. Never give the impression you don’t know what you are doing. The customer never wants to feel the pharmacist is not confident in his or her work.
10. Go one step further than the patient expects. Suggest a pill box for older patients, so they can manage their medications, for example. Or, for all patients, recommend times of the day to take their drugs and foods they should—or shouldn’t—take them with.
11. Reinforce information the doctor has probably given to the patient, says Gates. “That can instill even more confidence and shows the pharmacist knows what he’s talking about.” Ultimately everyone wants to feel they’ve taken the right medication and often people are very fearful about it.”
12. Don’t sound harried when you speak to patients by phone because it will be stressful for the customer, who will then feel he or she can’t ask the questions they want to. “So have a voice that’s not rushed and is calm. Let the patient know they can have as much of your time as they want,” says Gates.
13. Step around the counter when appropriate. George says he often leaves the pharmacy gate open on purpose and lots of people like to peek in. “It’s a great mystery and it gets people talking to me. That also results in me getting to know them better.”
14. Never comment about a patient’s disease state or make jokes about it.
15. Have a sense of humanity and empathy and treat every patient with respect.