PHARMACEUTICAL CARE
SUPPORTING EXCELLENCE
ALISON STRATH IS PRINCIPAL PHARMACEUTICAL OFFICER IN THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT. WITH ROOTS IN BOTH COMMUNITY PHARMACY AND ACADEMIA, ALISON ADVISES TEAMS DELIVERING BOTH THE BIG AMBITIONS FOR THE PHARMACY PROFESSION AND THE DAY-TO- DAY PROVISION OF PHARMACEUTICAL CARE ACROSS NHSSCOTLAND. ALISON RECENTLY OUTLINED THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT’S CURRENT PRIORITIES FOR PHARMACY TO JOHN MACGILL.
Division of the Scottish Government, which is led by Chief Pharmaceutical Officer, Dr Rose Marie Parr. The Pharmacy Branch is responsible for delivering the Government’s Achieving Excellence in Pharmaceutical Care strategy. It also oversees policy and funding arrangements for community pharmacy remuneration and reimbursement, the Scottish Drug Tariff and reimbursement of appliance contractors and dispensing doctors. The Medicines Branch develops and implements policy on access to new
A 6 - SCOTTISH PHARMACIST
lison Strath (AS): I work across the two branches that constitute the Pharmacy and Medicines
medicines and influences policies on the safe use of medicines, which often involves working with UK Government departments on reserved policy areas, such as the Pharmaceutical Price Regulatory Scheme and controlled drugs regulations.
I have a particular interest in the Scottish Government’s ePharmacy Programme which underpins the community pharmacy contract services and allows electronic prescription data to be shared between GPs, community pharmacists and National Services Scotland. We were the first part of the UK to have end-to-end electronic sharing of prescription information, which links prescribed and dispensed
data on an individual patient level and provides the NHS with robust data capture which, in turn, can underpin improvements in the planning and delivery of NHS services. Meanwhile, the new Universal Claim Framework is removing the need for community pharmacy teams to hand-write forms for services like smoking cessation, the gluten free food service and access to emergency contraception.
A developing area of work is to meet the challenge of the new European Directive on Falsified Medicines which aims to make the supply chain as safe as possible by eliminating any risk of counterfeit medicines entering it. While one element of this is to have
tamperproof packaging, the other is about the ability to track every medicine. Each pharmacy, whether in the community or a hospital, will need to be able to decommission a medicine at the point of supply to the patient and this will verify that it has left the supply chain.
The Directive comes in next year and I am currently working with digital colleagues in Scottish Government, CPS and the NHS to ensure it is implemented in a way that causes as little disruption as possible. Equally, it provides a platform to realise new benefits by introducing tracking and scanning systems that can support safe dispensing and, if there is a recall, allow the immediate identification of where that medicine is. If we are clever about how we design these systems, we will be able to collect all sorts of real world data, giving us new tools to examine the impact of medicines on improving public health. These are potential long-term advantages, but we are not there yet. In the short term, it is going to be
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