A ‘thank you’ to pharmacy in a time of pandemic
IN FEBRUARY, SCOTLAND’S CHIEF PHARMACEUTICAL OFFICER, PROFESSOR ROSE MARIE PARR, ANNOUNCED THAT SHE WAS GOING TO RETIRE. BUT, WITHIN A FEW DAYS, ALL HER PLANS TO STEP BACK WERE SHELVED AS THE PROFESSION WAS CONFRONTED BY THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IT HAS FACED: TO MEET THE DRAMATICALLY INCREASED DEMAND FROM PATIENTS WHILE TRYING TO KEEP THEIR STAFF SAFE. PROFESSOR PARR TELLS SP HOW SHE FEELS THAT THE PROFESSION MORE THAN STEPPED UP....
By John Macgill I
am really proud of the pharmacy profession as a whole, and the part each person has played in the weeks since early March.
If I start with community pharmacy, it has remained, throughout, one of the few truly accessible primary care settings that has stayed open, offering access to health professional care when the public really needed it. The community pharmacy network has shown real resilience through extraordinarily demanding times.
6 - SCOTTISH PHARMACIST
Teams have managed unprecedented levels of activity particularly in March where we saw an increase in prescription activity alone of 50 per cent and more. And that doesn’t tell the whole story because we also know that pharmacies provided walk- in consultations for advice, for self-care and treatment, throughout.
Keeping all that going has been really challenging for community pharmacy. Teams had to adapt really quickly to those demands while taking measures to ensure the safety of both staff and the public, including using personal
protection equipment (PPE) and reorganising their layouts.
Other things changed. Community pharmacists finally have access to Emergency Care Summaries (ECS), which we got really quickly having been asking for it for a long time. Meanwhile, the extension of the Minor Ailments Service to the whole population has meant that community pharmacies have been able to give advice, treatment or make referrals for everyday common conditions, which has been really important.
Hospital pharmacy meanwhile reconfigured quickly in response to COVID-19, and pharmacists and pharmacy technicians have shown great flexibility, working across different settings. I have been to a number of hospitals over the last six weeks to ten weeks and have seen what is involved in transforming a general medical ward into a COVID- 19 ward, and what that means for staff. I think creating the NHS Louisa Jordan hospital in just two weeks has been another really good example of how people can come together and achieve so much in response to a
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
