The Pharmacy Efficiency Triangle: a modern blueprint for your dispensary workflows

In the world of kitchen design, the Kitchen Work Triangle is the concept which links the relationship and proximity of your sink, stove, and refrigerator. When designing a kitchen, it is considered the gold standard for optimising movement and minimizing wasted effort for the cook.

This principle, rooted in ergonomics and spatial efficiency, can be brilliantly adapted to another high-stakes, fast-paced environment. Welcome to the Dispensary Efficiency Triangle—a conceptual framework designed to streamline pharmacy workflows, reduce errors, and enhance productivity by strategically positioning the three most critical zones in a pharmacy setting.

Understanding the Kitchen Work Triangle

Before diving into the pharmacy model, let’s briefly revisit the kitchen triangle. The idea is simple: the three primary work areas (sink, stove, refrigerator) should form a triangle, with each work area situated between 1.2 and 2.5 meters away. This layout minimises unnecessary movement and maximises efficiency.

Translating the Triangle to Dispensary Design

In a pharmacy environment, the stakes are higher with accuracy, speed and safety critical. In the current environment where the scope of practice is shifting to the pharmacist taking on a greater holistic and more hands-on role, efficiency within the dispensary is critical.

The Dispensary Efficiency Triangle adapts the kitchen model by identifying three core functional zones of the customer engagement point, the medication storage and the preparation area overlaid by the resources of the pharmacist and the dispense technician and if these resources and tasks are aligned in a work triangle, optimum efficiencies and synergies can be achieved.

1. Position the pharmacist(s) at the forefront, where they are of most value to the business in delivering healthcare to patients, which also builds loyalty for your pharmacy. They can appropriately counsel patients, direct them to aspects of expanded professional services, offer additional, ‘add-on’ sales. In this forward dispense approach, the pharmacist decides if a script is to be directly dispensed or if it should be passed on to the technician.

2. Support the pharmacist by utilising dispense technician(s) as an important resource to streamline dispensary operations. This can include the management and receipting of stock into storage as well as supporting the pharmacists with the selection, dispensing and labelling of prescription medications, this can be invaluable especially with bulk dispensing.

3. Integrating superior medication storage practices which support both the pharmacist and dispense tech. This facilitates a space and time efficient, organised and safer dispensing method of medication. Further efficiencies can be gained through the addition of automation which has sophisticated ordering algorithms, speeds up stocktakes and can mark stock directly off an invoice.

Considerations when designing the efficiency triangle

The close proximity and direct access of these three key resources, without physical barriers between them, facilitates a seamless process, minimising double handling and unnecessary movements. This design approach can also best serve the patient at the input and output stage of the process.

To apply the triangle effectively:

1. Minimise travel distance between zones to improve efficiency, reduce fatigue and time loss. For each resource, they should not be positioned too close or too far from one another in order to avoid excessive walking, hinder direct communication, or allow for bottlenecks to form. The optimal distances between the three points will vary due to differences in dispensary set up, shapes and sizes.
2. Avoid cross-traffic between staff and patients to enhance safety and privacy. To ensure that goods and information can flow unimpeded, traffic flow through the centre of the triangle should be minimised.
3. Facilitate good communication between zones. This supports verbal communication and oversight. Obstructions such as walls, pillars and cabinets, which intersect the triangle’s legs, should be removed whenever possible.
4. Adapt to automation by integrating robotic dispensing units which can enhance efficiency in storage and automating non-core functions in the dispensary. If designing a dispensing robot into the mix the suggested distance is 1.2 metres from the pharmacist to the exit point.
5. Complex dispensing operations – where your pharmacy may have more complex back of house operations which might include a significant packing business, you can also apply a double efficiency triangle to the thinking.

Benefits of the Pharmacy Efficiency Triangle

• Improved Workflow: Staff can move easily between tasks without backtracking, cross overs or bottlenecks.
• Reduced Errors: Clear separation of tasks helps maintain focus and reduce distractions.
• Enhanced Patient Experience: Faster service and better communication lead to higher satisfaction and this drives loyalty to your pharmacy.
• Improved profitability: This can be achieved when you have the pharmacist recommending professional services along with companion selling of S3 products.
• Improved ROS (return on space): when the space utilisation, including storage is considered, under-utilised space can be converted into consulting rooms or additional retail space, overall improving your return on space calculations.
• Improved staff satisfaction: In a time where it is difficult to hire and retain staff, offering a pharmacy environment which is well designed, efficient and thoughtful is shown to reduce stress levels in staff and improve their engagement with your business.

The concept of the Pharmacy Efficiency Triangle was developed in 2011 by the team at Willach Pharmacy Solutions and has been used as the basis for design at Pharmacium and Willach ever since.

If you are interested in understanding how the principles of smart design can be implemented in your business to transform your pharmacy into a more productive, more profitable and desirable health destination contact us for a confidential chat on how we might be able to assist you.