Susan Deacon: palliative care, mental health and frail elderly to be targeted |
The Scottish Health Department is to allocate £0.5m to be spent on pilot projects on pharmaceutical care in the community over the next year.
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The palliative care scheme would be aimed at ensuring that patients received continuity in the supply of their medicines and drug delivery devices. A network of specialist community pharmacies would be established to provide information and advice to patients, carers and health care professionals.
The mental health scheme would involve voluntary pharmacy registration by patients who would be referred by their doctors to community pharmacists providing supervised consumption of medication. The patients would have their prescriptions dispensed on a daily basis.
For frail elderly patients aged over 75 years living alone or requiring additional support, community pharmacists would be involved in drawing up plans with other health care professionals aimed at simplifying drug regimens and assessing patients' ability to manage their medicines.
In her speech, Ms Deacon referred to the need for partnerships to be formed between the Scottish Parliament and health care professionals if the Parliament was to achieve its aim of making real improvements to the National Health Service in Scotland (NHSiS) and to the health of the Scottish people.
Scotland's network of over 1,000 community pharmacies in its towns and villages was where the people received their pharmaceutical care, the Minister said. This was why she was pleased to announce the pharmaceutical care pilot schemes.
Ms Deacon also hinted that prescribing by community pharmacists for patients who were exempt from prescription charges might be on the agenda for discussion, but said that such a scheme would need to be introduced carefully.
She asked the assembled audience of health board and primary care trust executives, pharmacists and politicians a series of questions. How responsive were the pharmaceutical services to the needs of the population in their areas? How did they fit in with other social services? How could services be encouraged in deprived and rural areas? How could repeat prescribing services, which accounted for 70 per cent of all prescribing, be improved?
"I have posed a lot of questions because we do not have a fixed idea of how to tackle these problems. We want to develop the answers together so that we can make a real impact on the health of the patients we serve," Ms Deacon concluded.
Both the pharmaceutical care pilots and the possibility of pharmacists prescribing from a limited list were welcomed by Mr George Romanes (chairman, SPGC).
"We will work on a smooth and phased introduction of pharmaceutical care in the community services, but there is a lot of work to do," he said.
Mr Romanes went on to list a number of areas where he hoped that community pharmacists could play a bigger role and which he hoped that the Minister and health care executives in the audience would take into consideration. These included reduction in wastage of medicines due to inappropriate prescribing or non-compliance, discharge planning and the interface between primary and secondary care, information technology links between general medical practitioners and pharmacies, and health promotion and advice to patients through pharmacies, possibly as part of Scotland's version of NHS Direct.
"We would like to see more suitably qualified pharmacists co-opted on to primary care trust and local health care co-operative boards. The skills needed in running a community pharmacy business are also suited to the running of the new NHSiS. The pharmacists who serve on the area contractors committees are the ground troops of pharmacy and are people who it is worth getting to know," Mr Romanes said.