Personal Homecare Pharmacy CSE Case Study

We acknowledge that Customer Service Excellence (CSE) is a nationally recognised standard designed to drive customer-focused change, enabling organisations to undergo rigorous external assessment to identify areas of strength and development.

At Personal Homecare Pharmacy (PHP) we are committed to delivering recognisable exceptional customer service within the Clinical Homecare Sector. We aim to put patient-centred care into practice whilst working in collaboration with the NHS and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

We are driven by our commitment to deliver our mission, vision and our eight core principles of ensuring patient-centred care is embedded into everyday practice across the organisation.

We chose to commission Assessment Services Limited to assess us to help benchmark our current performance and, most importantly, highlight areas of improvement. We also believe that achieving this certification would provide independent evidence that our customer services are operating at a high level in order to give reassurance to our colleagues within the NHS and pharmaceutical sector.

Achieving and maintaining this certification is key to building trust and demonstrating our commitment to continuous improvement and the provision of high-quality personalised care.

We appointed a Chief Patient Officer to work alongside the Lead Homecare Pharmacist Compliance and Quality. They undertook a rigorous review of our performance by conducting meetings within all departments of the organisation and looking at our organisation’s performance metrics, standards and operating policies. This included internal metrics alongside the nationally recognised external key performance indicators set for the industry by the National Homecare Medicines Committee.

Working with the CSE standard has had a significant impact on how we design, deliver and continuously improve our services. It has strengthened our focus on implementing patient-centred care whilst providing a clear framework for reviewing and enhancing how we deliver customer service excellence.

For our staff, we have re-structured our Patient Services Team Leader roles into therapy specialists. Through additional training, they have developed a deeper understanding of the needs of people who are diagnosed with long-term conditions and who use our services. This has enabled them to provide more informed, empathetic and tailored support to patients.

We have also introduced Therapy Awareness Weeks, incorporating interactive learning activities, quizzes and sessions with both internal and external speakers. This has strengthened our organisation-wide understanding of different therapies and patients’ needs, while also increasing staff knowledge, engagement and passion. As a result, we have seen a stronger, more consistent focus across the organisation on making a meaningful difference to each patient, with employees demonstrating greater confidence, knowledge and commitment in delivering high-quality patient-centred care.

For our partners, NHS and pharmaceutical manufacturing, this certification has reinforced confidence in our ability to deliver high-quality, patient-centric services. It is improving collaboration, transparency, communication and working relationships.

Overall, it has strengthened our credibility as a high-quality clinical homecare provider.

Our mission is to deliver safe, personalised and innovative clinical homecare that empowers patients to be treated where they feel most comfortable. We are committed to resilient, agile and customer-focused care, improving measurable outcomes for all those we support — patients, carers, partners, the NHS and pharmaceutical manufacturers. To achieve this, it is vital that all at PHP listen and take action when appropriate to implement changes to our operational practice.

Therefore, we were very pleased to receive the feedback from this assessment. One critical aspect of our business is dealing with complaints effectively. The assessor confirmed that the dedicated complaints handler effectively resolves issues from the outset, consistently meeting the three-day response target. However, the reliance on a single individual for this process was identified as a potential weakness. The organisation has acknowledged this risk, and PHP has taken action and recruited an additional member of the team to work exclusively in this area.

In addition to this we have sponsored a membership, in collaboration with the National Clinical Homecare Association (NCHA), to the Life Science Access Academy.

https://lsaccessacademy.com

This academy has various training modules that will be helpful to our employees. The plan is to review this and identify which modules will help our employees and which we can build into our mandated annual training plan. It was suggested by Assessment Services that PHP implement a targeted training need to improve employee awareness regarding cross-functional roles and workflows. This would aid improved understanding of the business.

We believe various modules within this library may help us with this. We are also looking to implement a cross-departmental job share scheme. A working group is currently being set up to evaluate how we can effectively implement this, again in line with recommendations from Assessment Services Limited.

We chose Assessment Services Ltd as our accreditation body for the Customer Service Excellence Awards due to their strong reputation for delivering high-quality, independent assessments against nationally recognised standards.

We understood that their approach would focus on adding real value, utilising structured frameworks that drive continuous improvement and enhance the customer experience.

What really stood out to us was that the assessors were not only detailed and asked highly relevant questions, but they also listened and operated in a non-threatening manner, which encouraged open and honest dialogue from all employees involved, as well as with external stakeholders.

The assessors were consistently responsive, supportive and easy to work with, ensuring a smooth and efficient process from start to finish. This really made the whole process enjoyable.

In addition, the Assessment Services intuitive online portal made the process easy to manage, submit our evidence and track progress throughout the assessment journey.

Sanjay Thanki – Lead Homecare Pharmacist Compliance and Quality. [email protected]

Liz Keating – Chief Patient Officer. [email protected]