Alison Sheard originally planned on a career in teaching, taking a part time job in the pharmacy her mum worked in during the holidays

Eventually, she realised that she enjoyed the work she did in the pharmacy far more than time spent in the classroom and decided to make the switch and go full time. 

Flashforward 22 years and Alison is now an area manager for Weldricks Pharmacy. Within her role, she is the line manager for 18 branches and also takes on two annual projects across the company, flu vaccination and the Pharmacy Quality Scheme (PQS). “I work closely with our learning department to make sure that training is complete and then that we can claim payments for this,” she explains with regards to the PQS.

“On top of this workload, Alison has also led the business in the last flu season, where our teams completed a record number of jabs to protect our patients,” says Weldricks superintendent pharmacist, Richard Hackett, who nominated Alison for the Service Excellence Award. “Alison has a positive attitude to everything that she does. She really gets to understand what is happening in a branch before making changes to how they operate.”

Flu service prowess

“I am most proud of the way I led my team with the flu service,” says Alison. “We have about 60 branches and when I joined as area manager someone else was running the service and it was only on offer in 20 of those 60. I took over and made the decision that we were going to go big. We had to treble the training, treble the resources and manage the accounts.”

Now, due to Alison’s efforts all 60 branches offer the service. “I led the company on it as they had never done it to this size and we used every single vaccination we ordered, nothing went to waste, which was amazing – every branch took part!” she explains. “The hardest part was definitely encouraging teams to want to take part as it was a really daunting prospect for them. We made sure they had all the training they needed and really tried to encourage them as best as we could – the fact that every branch took part makes me even prouder of the way we managed to help them all feel comfortable in delivering the service.”

“Alison really understands pharmacy,” adds Richard. “She knows how to ensure that everyone she manages is fully trained in everything that they do.”

The RoE judges agreed and were particularly impressed with Alison’s commitment to getting the best out of the services. Alison shows “great dedication to drive her branches in service delivery”, says Rupen Sedani, retail clinical superintendent for Avicenna. 

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