Philip James
UK Regional Pharmacy Manager
My job as a Regional Manager is mainly about supporting the stores. We support the stores both from the professional side and also from the business side so there are two sort of main areas that we focus on. We currently have 242 Tesco pharmacies. This is an increase of about 50 over the last couple of years and we've got quite a large expansion plan for our pharmacies in the future. Services that we offer in Tesco are enhanced services, which are paid by Primary Care Trust, and these range from methadone supervision, smoking cessation programs, minor ailment schemes so a whole host of different services that we can offer from our pharmacies.
My team consists of 26 Pharmacy Managers. We probably have about 40 pharmacists and a few hundred staff. My job - as I said - is to support the pharmacists - the whole team really, in achieving their Key Performance Indicators, any people issues which come up, the recruitment as well for Pharmacists and Pharmacy Managers. I would say the benefits of Tesco are first of all the package- we have a good salary, we have different share schemes that you can join, we have the staff discount and I think one big key area as well is professional development - continuous professional development. Every pharmacist in the organisation can undertake professional development on Tesco time.
We have recently taken all our Pharmacy Managers through a leadership course where we've taken them away for three days to a hotel and that's been absolutely fantastic - we've had quite a lot of good feedback from that. The other thing I would say is the difference between Tesco is the management training that you get. There are always training sessions happening in store or in the regions and there's a continuous management programme both for pharmacies and for the rest of the store.
