From Miss N. K. Tanna, MRPharmS
SIR,—It was with great interest that I read the short review "Practice research taster" (PJ, September 18, 1999) and would like to congratulate you for giving pharmacist colleagues unable to attend the British Pharmaceutical Conference quick, up-to-date information on ongoing pharmacy practice research.
There are a couple of points that I would like to clarify with reference to the papers R4 and R62 discussed under the heading of "Women’s health issues". First, I am in post as the specialist pharmacist to the menopause team at Northwick Park (now the North West London Hospitals NHS trust). It is worth noting that this multidisciplinary team comprises a GP associate specialist, medical research fellow, clinical nurse practitioners, nurse counsellor and specialist pharmacist. This innovative team is headed by consultant gynaecologist Joan Pitkin. It is this team that runs the outpatient specialist menopause clinic every Thursday morning at this district general hospital.
I am involved in providing informational and advice support to patients, either on a one-to-one basis or during half-hour patient group discussion sessions on Thursday mornings. As I work closely on-site with the team, I am able to practise a high standard of pharmaceutical care for these patients.
The community pharmacists who attended for training spent the later half of the morning at the clinic sitting in at doctor-patient, nurse-patient, pharmacist-patient consultations and rated these highly on their evaluation forms. It is entirely understandable that they focused on additional counselling and discussion with their HRT prescription customers in the community during the intervention stage of the study. In the control group, the pharmacists ensured that the patient had the right prescription as per their professional remit but did not usually report getting involved in further discussion. Training and/or the availability of private counselling areas and time and/or the lack of remuneration may be factors, although the latter two aspects were not under investigation in this pilot study. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all 40 Brent and Harrow community pharmacists who participated in this study and can report that we have now obtained funding to offer more training places.
Finally, what was interesting when assessing patient satisfaction with the specialist pharmacist service was that the patients in the group that had discussion sessions with the specialist pharmacist at the menopause clinic reported having discussed issues pertinent to the menopause and HRT at some stage with their community pharmacist to a much higher extent than patients who did not have discussion sessions with the specialist pharmacist. In fact, as I have reported, a quarter of patients in the latter group did not know what a specialist pharmacist does. This leads me to suggest that patients need to be better informed of the pharmacist service provided at the Northwick Park menopause clinic, and that if patients find that the service is useful, then they may be more likely to view their community pharmacist as another health professional resource for information and advice.
Nuttan Tanna
Specialist Pharmacist Research Fellow, Menopause Clinical and Research Unit, Northwick Park & St Mark’s NHS Trust