Case Study - Recruiting and Retaining Staff

Ms Morphine’s primary problem is finding out why the vacancy rates for pharmacists and technicians in her department are so high, compared to the rest of her comparator group. Low rates of placement for pre-registration pharmacy graduates, an inability to recruit and retain good ATO’s, spiraling agency costs, and a bad reputation among staff contribute to the difficulty. To help solve her problem, Ms Morphine must 1) fill pre-registration pharmacy graduate positions; 2) find and retain good ATO’s; 3) decrease agency costs, and 4) improve the pharmacy department’s reputation so that permanent staff members will wish to work there.

To fill pre-registration pharmacy graduate positions, Ms Morphine should work with the career offices of local pharmacy schools to determine registration dates and the most effective times and ways to reach graduates. Ms Morphine should make sure that her job description is well-defined and geared towards new pharmacists. She can also ask the career offices to help advertise the positions, either within the schools or through job databases and listservs for alumnae.

According to the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, “[f]rom January 1st 2005 onwards pharmacists have…a professional obligation to ensure that dispensing / pharmacy assistants are competent in the areas in which they are working to a minimum standard equivalent to the new Pharmacy Services Scottish/National Vocational Qualification (S/NVQ) level 2 qualification or undertaking training towards this.” The requirement can be met by completing a training program relevant to the job role through four acceptable ways. (See here for more details.) To find and retain good ATO’s, Ms Morphine should examine her job description for an ATO and make sure that the qualifications that she has provided includes this requirement. If potential applicants have trouble fulfilling the requirement, Ms Morphine can implement a training program that provides the equivalent of an S/NVQ level 2 in Pharmacy Services upon completion. (As suggested by Michael Cross, Director of Pharmacy, she can invest in a trainer for the NVQ level 2.) She should also indicate in the job description the amount of time that an ATO is expected to remain in the position to ensure that prospective employees are willing to stay for a “reasonable” amount of time.

Ms. Morphine’s bigger problem is that the pharmacy department has a bad reputation among potential staff members, due to the lack of permanent staff who know the local practices, which has led to risks occurring in the department, and the escalating costs of working with a hiring agency. Ms Morphine’s first line of order should be to ensure the safety of her employees, and to make sure that all of the staff members follow the proper procedures for safety in the department, regardless of their employment status. If she must depend on agency staff, it would be best if she were able to hire from one place, so that the agency can develop some familiarity with the pharmacy department and its practices that it can pass along to its staff. However, it is to the department’s benefit to save costs and to reduce the number of agency staff, especially if the agency that Ms Morphine is currently working with is not meeting departmental expectations. This circles back to Ms Morphine’s inability to hire permanent staff members, such as pharmacy graduates and good ATO’s.

Ms Morphine needs to determine why she is having trouble recruiting and retaining staff, and a good place to start is to examine her own management style. Her description indicates that she is “extremely conservative, lacking in innovation and resistant to change of any kind,” and that she harbors a strong distrust of Mr Silver and the other community pharmacists. This suggests that the problem may be in part due to Ms Morphine’s personality. If she is resistant to change, it may be difficult to persuade her to adopt new hiring practices and/or a new management style. If the problem lies with herself, she needs to be made aware of this. Her supervisor and other immediate superiors should point out this problem to her in her next appraisal, per Nick Wookey’s suggestion.

It would be a good idea for Ms Morphine to talk with other senior managers and get an idea of how they would deal with or have dealt with such problems – she definitely should not just keep quiet and hope that the problem will turn itself around, since by her own admittance, she doesn’t know how to get out of this “downward spiral.” However, this goes back to whether Ms Morphine is willing to consider new ideas and new ways of running the department. If she is not, then it is unlikely that speaking with other senior managers will do very much good. However, if in the base case scenario, she is open to new suggestions, Ms Morphine may find that her problems are not as insurmountable as they presently seem. (That may be a big "if.")