COLLABORATION
AS THE ROYAL PHARMACEUTICAL SOCIETY IN SCOTLAND AFFIRMS DR JOHN MCANAW FOR A THIRD TERM AS CHAIR, HE TELLS SP OF HIS HOPES FOR THE SHORT AND LONG TERM IN PHARMACY.
‘TOTAL by Dr John McAnaw T
here have been a number of positive developments recently involving pharmacy. There is, for example, the Scottish Government’s investment of £16.2m to have a pharmacist working with every GP practice and their funding in Inverclyde of a pilot project of an expanded Minor Ailment Service which is free for all patients in the area, and which includes Patient Group Directions for the treatment of uncomplicated urinary tract infections, impetigo and shingles.
These PGDs are also part of the Pharmacy First initiative, which is also the focus of a bid for funding from the Primary Care Transformation Fund and which, if successful, will see Pharmacy First roll out across Scotland.
These are, indeed, exciting times for pharmacy, with our pharmacists in primary care and community pharmacy given a real opportunity to expand the level of pharmaceutical care that they can provide for patients and the public.
It is also good news for our GP colleagues, as it provides us with the potential to lessen some of the pressures they are currently experiencing in GP surgeries and in the out of hours services.
Whilst these are all steps in the right direction to further
10 - SCOTTISH PHARMACIST
integrate pharmacy into the wider multidisciplinary care team and to expand our contribution within that, there is also a need to think about how pharmacy can work better on an intra-professional level too.
In the hospital setting, there are examples of pharmacists sharing the Immediate Discharge Letters for patients with the patient’s community pharmacist in some Boards. In 2011, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society published two related documents on improving the transfer of care under the title ‘Keeping patients safe when they transfer between care providers’, with one providing information for healthcare professions and the other for providers and commissioners of NHS services.
However, it is unclear how widespread the sharing of information has become in response to these publications. More recently, the Scottish Patient Safety Programme has also prompted us to think more about transition of care, with a key focus on the spread of medicines reconciliation across the health care system in Scotland in an effort to reduce harm.
To me, we are on the journey and we are making some good progress, but what will ‘good’ look like? There is still something missing. The patient experience must be one where they
feel their pharmaceutical care is ‘joined up’ whenever they move from one pharmacist or setting to another, or even within the same setting.
Therefore, we need to focus on how we work more collectively as a professional group in support of continuity of pharmaceutical care. In other words, we need to engineer a ‘Total Pharmacy’ approach, where pharmacists routinely support the patient journey through the sharing of relevant information on medicines, care issues, monitoring and follow-up with their pharmacy counterparts in other locations. Where this is already happening, we need to encourage more of the same and to introduce it elsewhere.
The decision to fund pharmacists to work with GP practices, I think, offers a great opportunity to kick- start ‘Total Pharmacy’, and would be a real driver for practice pharmacists to work more closely with their local community pharmacists, who have a key role to play in care planning and patient follow-up. For example, if a pharmacist working with a GP practice performs a polypharmacy review, they need to share the outcomes of that review with the patient’s community pharmacist, passing on any relevant monitoring/follow-up actions that can be done by the community pharmacist. This gets us into a
two-way intra-professional sharing of information and starts to build patient confidence in the shared care pharmacist can provide.
Also, if a patient is scheduled for a polypharmacy review - either in the GP practice or the community pharmacy - part of the work-up ahead of the review should be to ask about current care issues from our relevant counterparts in the other location.
For the patient, the knowledge that their pharmacists are working together and sharing responsibility for the care provided has to be a positive experience for them. Also, if the same approach were used for Out-Patient Department appointments - where a pharmacist is involved - or hospital admission and discharge communication, just think what the patient experience might be then!
To provide truly person-centred care, we need to work better together as a profession, and create the right model and framework to support it in the local setting. This is where it will be most meaningful for patients. We have always aspired to provide continuity of pharmaceutical care because we know it is the right thing to do, so let’s use the current opportunities we have to achieve it.
We owe it to our patients, and we owe it to ourselves. •
PHARMACY’ – A COLLECTIVE APPROACH TO DELIVERING PERSON- CENTRED CARE
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
