The We Love Audits team had a fantastic time at the 2019 Clinical Pharmacy Congress, where the largest gathering of Europe’s top clinical pharmacy professionals came together under one roof at ExCeL London over two days in June.
For us, it was a highly-interesting and productive couple of days, and we hope to see some real benefits in the coming weeks and months. As far as attending industry exhibitions and trade shows go, this one was right up our street.
Some trade shows we’ve done in past have been across a much wider spectrum, but it was quick to see in just the first couple of hours how this event was right where we wanted to be. We really fitted in!
Janis and Rachael were our troops on the ground for the two days, expertly manning Stand C65 and warmly greeting any visitors who stopped to see what we are all about.
Some 80% of the people attending, whether they were visitors, exhibitors or speakers, are carrying out some sort of audit, so there were quite a few people who came to see us who had been tasked specifically with coming to see us. And, luckily for us, we were the only company of our kind there.
We Love Audits is, unsurprisingly, all about audits. Although we are widely known as We Love Surveys, providing cool, innovative survey and feedback solutions, We Love Audits was our primary focus for the CP Congress, and the opportunity to meet and mingle with clinical pharmacy professionals was too good not to take on.
Audits don’t have to be so painful!
We were able to demonstrate just what we’re about, and how we can help make the laborious process of carrying out audits a much nicer experience.
In a nutshell, We Love Audits are specialists in making audits digital. Our platform transforms audit processes from the complex and time-consuming, to the quick and painless. Our audit solutions can:
· Drastically reduce administration time needed to carry out compulsory audits
· Remove the need for paper altogether – contributing to the NHS Paperless 2020 goal
· Live audit completion and real-time response updates
· Digital reporting, removing the need for excessive printing and storage
· More than 10 years’ experience working with NHS organisations
That was the message we wanted to get across at ExCeL London, and we’re happy to say we were successful in doing so. We came away with a great number of leads, from NHS Trusts, to primary care services, to pharmacies and GPs.
Our name certainly proved appealing, with many people attracted to us just because we were shouting about how much we love audits. Many of the people we spoke to have come across audits at some stage in their work and were quite open in telling us how much they hated having to do them, so to see how much we love doing them was a big selling point.
They were interested to see how our solution digitalises audits, how it saves money, how quickly it reports, and how much time it saves in general. We’re happy to say people’s eyes were wide open! People were especially excited to see how we can help get rid of paper.
Showcasing our survey solutions
With the work we’ve done for the London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust – digitalising their controlled drug audits – we feel we really are experts now, and we were delighted to be asked so many questions on how we do audits and how we think digitising them can be of huge benefit. Hopefully, we gave some good, solid answers.
Of course, we’re about more than audits. We’ve got a long track record of providing survey solutions and specialist point of feedback devices, such as our funky little Buzz Boxes, and this event was also an opportunity to showcase some of our other abilities as a company.
We did a little survey on iPads for visitors to carry out after we’d spoken to them, which perfectly demonstrated how we can create any type of survey. People thought it was really cool. Which it is!
We saw some great presentations, particularly a demo by Analytics Engines on smart analytics, and a great talk by Richard Ashcroft (not the Verve singer but the NHS Digital director) on digital medicines. They were really insightful.
One thing we noticed was how a lot of people in NHS primary care services use software called EMIS. It’s not something we’d heard of before, but we were being asked if we can integrate our audit solution to other systems. We can’t at the moment, but that’s another reason why the event was so useful for us, because it means it’s something we can look further into for the future.
All in all, it was two very productive days for us. How beneficial it was, well, we’ll hopefully see in the next few weeks. But the Clinical Pharmacy Congress was the best choice for us by far as a business, and we’re already looking forward to going again next year.