Interview: Getting the balance right at Rowlands

Rowlands Pharmacy is working hard to offer its pharmacists plenty of career development opportunities and a better work-life balance, says managing director Nigel Swift. Interview by Richard Thomas.

The workforce crisis in community pharmacy shows no sign of abating. Whether the root cause is poor working conditions in the multiples or simply the lure for pharmacists of applying their clinical skills elsewhere in primary care and enjoying a better work-life balance is a matter of fierce debate. Rowlands Pharmacy is feeling the effects like everybody else.

It is “really difficult” to recruit new pharmacists at present, says managing director Nigel Swift. “The community pharmacy sector as a whole is certainly competing with primary and secondary care for personnel such as pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.”

While Rowlands Pharmacy’s unfilled positions are “not quite” as high as the full-time equivalent workforce vacancy rate reported in Health Education England’s recent survey, “we’ve definitely got challenges in parts of the country”, he says. “Our biggest focus is on retaining the pharmacists we’ve got, and we are trying to offer more career development opportunities and support work-life balance, in part by offering flexible working.”

Omnichannel offering

Rowlands Pharmacy navigated its way through the pandemic in relatively good shape. According to its most recent Companies House filing, the company managed to shrink its losses after taxation in 2020-21 by 84 per cent to £11.6m compared to its £71.3m loss in 2019-20.

While turnover took a 2.8 per cent dip from £455.6m to £442.7m, gross margin improved, rising from 27.6 per cent to 30.3 per cent. Operating losses shrank by 99.8 per cent, from £64.8m to £113,000.

Nigel is full of praise for the performance of his teams during Covid – “they stood up and were exceptional” – and says that after divesting a number of stores and reducing opening times and working hours in some of its remaining pharmacies in recent years, the company is now more streamlined and focused. However, it continues to “look at every pharmacy individually as part of our ongoing retail transformation programme”. 

Nigel sees Rowlands concentrating more on an “omnichannel” offering involving more centralised dispensing, freeing up time for its bricks and mortar pharmacies to focus on clinical services. He points to its MediPAC dispensing facility in Runcorn as the multiple’s main means of freeing up capacity at branch level.

Nigel says that if laws around hub and spoke are changed, the company’s dispensing technology will be made available to all Numark members, as it has done with its Hey Pharmacist online repeat prescription ordering app. 

Waxing lyrical…

When Nigel was interviewed in January on Pharmacy Magazine’s In Conversation With podcast, one of the biggest discussion points afterwards concerned his comments on what Rowlands was doing to mitigate the impact of the Government funding cuts in England. Can the current contractual framework alone sustain the network?

He responded on the pod that the growth in both NHS and private services offered “huge opportunities”, citing the Covid vaccination programme as a powerful example. However, he added that a recently launched ear wax removal service had proven highly popular with patients, with many GP surgeries having stopped the service. “Where we’ve launched it, we’re actually booked up for three months,” he said. 

Rowlands is now looking at a number of other services including extending its travel vaccine proposition, increasing the number of pharmacies offering its new weight management service and introducing more private services such as chickenpox vaccinations. 

“We will continue engaging with NHS services as they are rolled out, but we see private services as an important growth area for us as well.” Other areas of opportunity he sees for the company include health and wellbeing lines and P medicines, such as pain management products.

“There are 10 million people in this country suffering from chronic pain and it can take over 10 weeks to see a specialist. We want to be in a position where a patient can walk into a Rowlands pharmacy and have a conversation about their pain and how the pharmacy team can help them.”

“Rowlands is concentrating on an omnichannel offering with more centralised dispensing, freeing up time for our pharmacies to offer clinical services”

Innovation in practice

Nigel points to the company’s new concept pharmacy in Ellon, Aberdeenshire as an example of Rowlands’ flagship investment in new state-of-the-art service provision alongside a traditional dispensing offer. 

Specialist services at Ellon include access to an automated Pharmaself 24-hour prescription collection point giving patients added flexibility and convenience, allowing them to collect their prescriptions at a time that suits them, he says. 

Flu and pneumococcal vaccinations are available as part of a wider service portfolio, which provides customers with expert advice for treating minor ailments as part of Scotland’s Pharmacy First scheme. 

A self-service SiSU Health Station measures BMI, blood pressure and body fat in less than five minutes. Users have access to a free online health dashboard, where they can track their progress and access free health improvement plans and programs online or receive healthy living advice from the pharmacy team if they’d prefer.

A focus on offering private health services from pharmacies can be controversial as they are predicated on customers’ ability to pay for them. Does Rowlands risk widening local health inequalities? 

“People want services in their communities; they don’t want to travel as we’ve seen with Covid vaccinations,” he says. “We must listen to what our customers and patients want with private services – and we do. The ear wax removal service is a good example of this. It’s not glamorous but there is clearly a need. Customers are really on board with it.”

Excited for the future

The interview finishes the way it starts, talking about the ethos of being a community pharmacist. “I genuinely believe community pharmacy is a calling,” says Nigel.

“Pharmacists could work somewhere else for the same money, but they choose to work in the community because they feel they can add value to that community. They know almost every patient who walks through their door and the patients know that they are open and available to help. At Rowlands I’m excited for the future.”

Back story 

Nigel Swift joined Phoenix from Well Pharmacy in September 2021 as deputy managing director of the group and managing director of Rowlands Pharmacy. He was previously sales and marketing director at McKesson UK.

Another chance to read our interview with @RowlandsTweets boss Nigel Swift, originally published in our March print edition https://t.co/zqx8PrrBYl> pic.twitter.com/DTx6rfE2Rc

— Richard Thomas (@PharMag_Richard) May 5, 2022