Your boss might not make these metrics mandatory but that doesn’t mean they don’t provide insightful data into your store-level operation. Just like individual practitioners, pharmacies themselves have identities. What's yours?

A U-turn is a manoeuvre to completely change direction. For most decisions in life, changing direction goes without much notice or consequence. Most of life’s day-to-day decisions don’t carry much consequence if we get them wrong. But there are 4 choices that carry much more weight.

Pharmacists don’t always take their own advice. We counsel on sleep hygiene and appropriate sedative use, then go home and turn on the TV or burn 35 minutes on our phones.

The make-up of a triathlete is not all that different from that of a pharmacist. Years of triathlon training and racing have taught me many translatable skills and qualities that have translated into my becoming a better pharmacy leader.

Sleep permits the brain to process the day, wipe away the emotional fragility of our interactions and wipe the slate clean. That’s the reason we say ‘sleep on it’ since you will be fresh-minded in the morning to decide.

As a pharmacy leader your goal should be to have the team deliver greater results after you are gone, demonstrating the power of your leadership in building teams, systems and culture.

When pharmacy staff get angry words from patients, what the pharmacy manager says next means something. Something potentially very important to how the interaction carries on.

Like doctors, in pharmacy we have specialists and generalists. I am referring to each of your registered and unregistered staff. The specialists are bone-deep great at a few skills that they have honed over years of experience.

A good staff member gave us her resignation the other day. This is certainly not the first time a staffing change presents a problem in pharmacy, yet every time you lose a good person it has you feeling like you have a new problem to solve.

So many times, life defaults us to approach mental 'balance' from the negative instead of the positive. In order to take, we must also give.