Healthy living
Healthy living is high on the agendas of governments across Europe. We believe that Alliance Boots has a role to play in helping to address concerns over unhealthy diets and rising levels of obesity. We want to use our expertise to help our customers and their customers make positive changes and live healthier lives.
Providing healthcare in the community
We are working hard to provide more healthcare services in the community. Pharmacy is well placed to provide many services, such as medicine checkups, weight management programmes, smoking cessation advice and flu vaccinations.
Medicine checkups (formerly called medicines use reviews in England and Wales) are an opportunity for patients to talk to our pharmacists in private about their medicines: what they do, how well they work, and how they can get the most out of them. Sometimes small changes, such as the time of day that medicine is taken, can change how well it works and may improve symptoms.
Our pharmacists in England and Wales carried out 560,000 medicine checkups during the year, a year on year increase of over 45%. We have a market leading position in the provision of such services with more than 80% of our pharmacies in the UK now incorporating private consultation facilities.
Customer care and service
Customer care and service is at the very heart of our pharmacy-led health and beauty strategy. Each week Boots UK analyses over 25,000 customer responses to in-store marketing surveys in order to better understand our customers’ evolving needs. In response to this feedback during the year Boots UK recruited around 950 pharmacists in the UK, introduced e-learning for our store colleagues and established a Boots commercial academy, all targeted at developing our customer offering.
