From Dr R. Needle, MRPharmS
SIR,—I have been following the rather acrimonious debate in your columns over hospital outpatient waiting times, which has demonstrated the breadth and depth of gulf of misunderstanding between hospital and community pharmacists. At the risk of prolonging the debate, I would like to inform your readers of our experience in Colchester and in the Essex Rivers Healthcare trust.
Conscious that providing an efficient and timely service to outpatients is important, we have worked hard over a number of years to keep waiting times down. With increasing workloads, we have had to adapt and revise our systems to cope, but we consistently achieve a median waiting time of less than 10 minutes. I acknowledge that this may be a longer waiting time than in community pharmacies, but in this time we carry out a clinical check by a pharmacist, the dispensing process and an independent final check, plus the querying with medical staff that is sometimes necessary. This “patient-service” target is not achieved at the expense of providing comprehensive input into the multidisciplinary team at ward level, or contributing our expertise to various groups and committees within the hospital. Indeed, we know that our advice, guidance and training provision to medical and nursing staff is valued by all grades. We fulfil the varied responsibilities required from hospital pharmacy today, by making full use of our well qualified and competent technical staff.
I do not believe that we have a particular magic formula in providing the service that we do, but if anyone would like further information, they are more than welcome to talk to me — or to any of the hardworking team of pharmacist and technician colleagues who make the service possible.
Richard Needle
Chief Pharmacist, Colchester General Hospital
Correction
The final part of the first sentence should have referred to the gulf of misunderstanding between hospital and some community pharmacists. The word "some" was inadvertently omitted from the version of the letter as printed.