Ask no questions, tell no lies

Every year pharmacies have a conduct a Community Pharmacy Patient Questionnaire (CPPQ) as part of their NHS contract. The questions are fixed, but you can add one of your own.

This has always seemed to us to be a pointless exercise. Unlike GPs and NHS dentists, we don't have patient lists, so if a patient isn't happy with the service they get from a pharmacy, they just move with the minimum of fuss. Obviously that becomes harder if there is just one in a town, but in Truro, where we have five pharmacies, it still gives plenty of choice.

This is not to say that we think that patient opinion isn't worth having - just that the CPPQ is an inflexible and time-consuming way of getting it. To give an example, we have to collect 125 questionnaires. In every year, 123 or 124 have rated us excellent or very good. That's nice to know, but it doesn't help us improve.

This year we asked patients what we don't do that they would like. The answers were interesting, partly because the wish list included a lot of things we already do - cholesterol testing, for example. One patient asked us to install chairs for patients, which leads me to wonder what she thought she was sitting on when she filled it in. A couple asked us to install a consultation room, which we have had for several years. It's small, but it exists. We don't use it as much as we'd like because it's small.

In The Globe we will have two consultation rooms. One will be for our everyday use, and will be in the corner of the pharmacy alongside the dispensary. The other, near the front doors, will be available for hire by other healthcare professionals, so we hope to have other services we can offer on our site. For the first time, we'll have customer toilets, including a disabled toilet, and of course we'll have the café so customers can have a cuppa and a sit down.

That extra question on last year's CPPQ has given us a number of ideas, so we must thank the anonymous contributors who made the suggestions. By all means use the comments box here to keep them coming. We can't guarantee they can all be worked in at this stage, but we'll certainly give them all some thought.