Getting started

Before rushing in and using GuildLink take some time to think about the best approach.

Here are the basic steps, you can find more help on each step in the help guide but you need to do some basics to get the system ready for use.

1. Sign up and create a site

2. Import content shared by PSL

3. Customise / personalise the content

4. Use the edit screen to customise your content

5. Add your own content, you can add new content for unique scenarios

6. Set up a strategy for staff to review SOPs in advance of an audit – assign staff to roles and set up review schedules on each SOP per role so that you know who needs to review each sop. There are tools to help bulk set this bulk set review and you can tweak individual SOPs later if you want more granular allocation

Suggestions and additional observations

Users and Staff are different. Even though you can load a user and a staff member at the same time and all users will probably be staff members, Users refer to the people who you can set up to review, edit and retire SOP’s. Users can view and record the fact that they have viewed/read an sop or be assigned a specific SOP/task to view. Staff can be anyone at the Pharmacy and you may have staff that never use GuildLink. Even so, they can still be in the system for staff lists or they may be assigned tasks but never manage that in GuildLink.

It’s best to set up all your staff, then import all the SOP’s you will need for your site, then review each individual SOP to customise it to your practice.
You might not need them all but if you import them all, retire any you don’t need then as new SOP’s become available, you will be able to clearly see what is new.

Tip

Anything highlighted in yellow in the body of an imported SOP, needs to be replaced with your pharmacy’s specifics. This is important as the auditor will want to see that SOPs are specific to your pharmacy in most cases and that you thought about how this impacts your pharmacy. The SOP acts as a great starting point but simply importing them and stopping there will usually cause more work later on and may make the audit more difficult.

Tip

You cannot “lose” or accidentally delete a SOP. Even retired or deleted SOP’s are still kept as old “versions”, so you can still access them if you accidentally lose them!

We hope that helps to get you started.

Consider how staff will review SOPs and confirm that they understand them. If your pharmacy has lots of staff each with a login then the electronic review model may be best. If its small and you don’t want staff to directly access GuildLink then a paper-based model would be best.

Electronic usage

Where you will have staff sign into GuildLink and click to confirm they have read an understood SOPs that apply to their role

• Set up users
• Set up staff
• Link users to staff using the email
• Set up SOPs to say how often for each SOP staff who are in the relevant role must review and confirm that they have read and understand that SOP

Paper based usage

• Print the content
• It’s important to print the content and get staff to sign that they have viewed it and keep a copy of this process
• File this in a way that is easy for an auditor to access and check

Tip

Over time new content may become available, you can import and customise it, but you will want to mark old content as replaced so that it doesn’t show and print with the current content.

Tip

When you find an operational issue that requires an update to a scenario (such as a dispensing error) make a new version of an existing SOP. That way the old SOP is available for viewing by auditors and the new updated content shows how you have learnt and improved.