The Government should make funding available to develop new areas of pharmacy practice and management, the All-Party Parliamentary Pharmacy Group has said in a report to Ministers. The report was written following the group's visit to St Thomas's hospital, London, last month (PJ, November 11, p708).
The group's report identifies four areas of practice and management which it says should be rolled out across the country. They are near-patient pharmacy services with greater use of patients' own drugs, involvement of pharmacists on post-take ward rounds, a greater involvement of hospital pharmacists in community based medicines management projects and outpatient clinics;,and a more flexible, competence based approach to grading and managing hospital pharmacists and their work.
In the report, the group says that during its visit to St Thomas's hospital the benefits of these four developments were explained. Greater use of near-patient pharmacy services, with patients being encouraged to bring in and use their existing medicines, had saved around £5 per patient or an annualised saving of £100,000 for the hospital. The group says that start-up funding should be provided by the Government to allow such services to be provided at other hospitals. The report notes that Mid Sussex NHS trust recently won a Health Service Journal clinical risk initiative award for a project which included a similar scheme.
In terms of grading of hospital pharmacists, St Thomas's hospital has established three categories — junior, mid-grade and practitioner — which the report equates with the house office, registrar and consultant grades for doctors. These categories are used in assessing the tasks to be undertaken by pharmacists. The reports says that more should be done to spread information about approaches to managing pharmacy practice.