Central Dales Practice

Central Dales Practice is an NHS GP practice based in the Yorkshire Dales, operating two surgeries in Hawes and Aysgarth.

They look after around 4,250 patients and also offer a dispensary service.

Having to count their patients’ prescriptions manually on a daily basis, they sought a quicker way and discovered Volumatic via an online dispensary forum…

The Challenge

Due to their deeply rural location, in addition to offering the usual GP services, Central Dales Practice also dispenses prescribed medication to all patients who are not local to a pharmacy. While they are happy to do this for their patients, on top of all the usual practice admin required by their busy team, they were also having to manually count patients’ prescription slips on a daily basis – which they felt was inefficient use of their staff resources.

The Solution

Being part of an online NHS forum, a member of the Central Dales Practice team read a thread from lots of fellow dispensaries discussing how time-consuming counting customer’s prescriptions was. They then saw a comment from another NHS practice in the UK singing the praises of a piece counter machine they had purchased from Volumatic, that eliminated manual counting and saved them a lot of time each day. In the hope that they could benefit from this kind of machine too, Lynn Irwin, Managing Partner at Central Dales Practice got in touch with Volumatic to see if we could help. Having already helped other dispensaries with similar issues, Volumatic recommended our FC75 piece counter.

Although primarily intended to count banknotes, the FC75 also has the capability to count other small pieces of paperwork, making it perfect for prescription slips, and was thoroughly tested by Volumatic to ensure it could do the job when we were first contacted by an NHS dispensary asking if our machines would be capable of counting prescriptions.