Care Awards

The Pharmaceutical Care Awards Introduction...[more]

Pharmacy can achieve a triple win Pharmacy has an unprecedented opportunity to achieve a triple win — for patients, for the National Health Service and for pharmacists, Dr Jim Smith, chief pharmaceutical officer, Department of Health, said in his presentation at the Pharmaceutical Care Awards ceremony...[more]

Entries feature improving patient access to medicines Improving patient access to medicines featured widely among the entries for the Pharmaceutical Care Awards 2000, said Eddie Gray, general manager and senior vice-president, GlaxoSmithKline UK...[more]

The Pharmaceutical Care Awards

The Pharmaceutical Care Awards were launched in 1992. They are organised by The Pharmaceutical Journal and sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. The awards are designed to recognise excellence in the development of pharmaceutical services and are given in three categories: shared care, community care and hospital care. Shared care entries require the participation of professionals in both the hospital and community setting. There are runner-up awards in each category. Applicants are required to demonstrate worthwhile initiatives that improve patient care and hence quality of life. This can be in relation to the pharmacist’s core activity of providing drug therapy or in relation to peripheral activities such as diagnostic testing, health promotion, formulary development, etc.

The developments must have been initiated in the calendar year to which the awards relate. Practising pharmacists may enter singly or in small groups. Co-operative efforts involving other professions are welcome but pharmacists should play a leading role in them. Entries from overseas are also welcome. Entrants are required to supply descriptions of their initiatives, explaining why, where, when and how they were undertaken and describing how their initiatives have improved patient care and how patient outcomes have been measured.

The winner in each category receives a framed certificate plus £1,000 to use in developing professional services. The runner-up prize is £500 for the same purpose.

Judging is carried out by a panel comprising representatives from professional bodies and from GlaxoSmithKline. The editor of The Pharmaceutical Journal acts as chairman.

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Pharmacy can achieve a triple win

Pharmacy has an unprecedented opportunity to achieve a triple win — for patients, for the National Health Service and for pharmacists, Dr Jim Smith, chief pharmaceutical officer, Department of Health, said in his presentation at the Pharmaceutical Care Awards ceremony.

“There is a massive agenda for change in the NHS in general and pharmacy in particular ... we have good foundations and much good practice to build on and, above all, high levels of energy, innovation and commitment which are very much in evidence at this awards ceremony.

“It represents the biggest opportunity and challenge for the profession in my working lifetime,” Dr Smith said. “We have to be successful. The status quo is no longer an option. But we do have an unprecedented opportunity of achieving a triple win: to improve patient care, to increase the efficiency of the NHS and, at the same time, to meet the professional aspiration of pharmacists. I am confident that the profession will deliver, and equally confident that the Pharmaceutical Care Awards, organised so efficiently by The Pharmaceutical Journal and supported so generously by GlaxoSmithKline, will continue to play a key role in promoting and rewarding leading edge practice.”

Dr Smith said that following the general election there was a renewed imperative in Government to achieve the objective and timescales set out in the NHS plan for England and the pharmacy programme which formed part of it. He emphasised that there was no separate pharmacy plan — it was an integral part of implementing the NHS plan.

The aims of the pharmacy programme — to increase the quality and accessibility of pharmaceutical services, to make more use of the skills and expertise of pharmacists and their staff, to help people get the best from their medicines, and to reduce avoidable ill-health — sat firmly within the NHS plan and the Government’s wider public health agenda. The NHS plan aimed to deliver integrated care. The breaking down of old barriers and demarcations had been illustrated in the winning entries to the Pharmaceutical Care Awards.

“If NHS or professional demarcations get in the way of patient care then they will have to go and be re-engineered. Pharmacy will have to be re-engineered too.”

The Department of Health’s own medicines management schemes for primary care “will help people who are currently getting less than optimal care because they find their medicines difficult to take or hard to remember, because they have complicated drug regimens which are not being reviewed often or well enough. Or because they simple do not have anyone to talk to about their medicines.”

Dr Smith said: “This is pharmaceutical care, although we have chosen to call it medicines management.”

He added that he was confident that the first prescribing by pharmacists would be seen within the next two years. The Health and Social Care Act 2001, under which prescribing rights would be established, also gave ministers the power to establish local pharmaceutical services. Some of those present at the awards ceremony might well find themselves part of the first cohort of pharmacists to be prescribing or providing local pharmaceutical services.

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Entries feature improving patient access to medicines

Improving patient access to medicines featured widely among the entries for the Pharmaceutical Care Awards 2000, said Eddie Gray, general manager and senior vice-president, GlaxoSmithKline UK.

Many of the entrants had developed medicine care plans for vulnerable patient groups, particularly for the elderly at home. Improving access to medicines was fundamental in optimising patient care and should be a joint goal between GSK and pharmacists. In the future there would be extensive opportunity for GSK and the profession to work together in close collaboration. Exactly what the relationship would be like was not yet clear but the company was identifying future opportunities in a consultation process with pharmacists. Mr Gray said that the entries for all three categories were of the highest standard and that the Pharmaceutical Care Awards were important because they demonstrated what pharmacists could do and that they were ideally situated to improve patient care. However, in order to perform their role pharmacists needed tangible support from the Government, the National Health Service and the pharmaceutical industry.

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Shared Care winner

Pharmacist involvement helps rehabilitation in the community

Exploring the benefits of a pharmacist in a community rehabilitation team.

Kouser Chaudry, MRPharmS (senior pharmacist and team leader, community rehabilitation team for older people), Gail Foord (rehabilitation team manager), Sue Eccles, MRPharmS (pharmacy manager), Theresa Rutter, MRPharmS (pharmacy manager), Parkside Health NHS Trust, Wembley, London

Having a pharmacist as part of a multidisciplinary rehabilitation team for older people in the London Borough of Brent has helped resolve medicine-related problems in around half of the patients seen by the team, the winners of the shared care section revealed.

“Many community rehabilitation teams have been established, but the Brent team is the first to include a pharmacist as a full member,” Kouser Chaudry explained. The Brent team consists of three physiotherapists, two occupational therapists, four rehabilitation assistants, a speech and language therapist, a dietitian, an administrator and a pharmacist. The aim of the team is to assist in the discharge of patients from hospital to their homes and to avoid readmission. Patients are automatically referred to the pharmacist if they are taking three or more medicines.

Between April and September, 2000, 50 patients were seen by the pharmacist. They were taking an average of seven medicines. In these patients 28 technical problems (such as physical access to medicines, hoarding or poor inhaler technique) and 20 clinical problems (such as dosing errors and adverse drug reactions) were addressed.

Mrs Chaudry said that future work would include examining prescribing data to assess the impact that the rehabilitation pharmacist’s recommendations were having on GPs.

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Community Care winner

Pharmacists can support patients’ social care needs

A pharmaceutical model scheme to support social services clients with medication problems in Perth and Kinross

Andrew Radley, MRPharmS (principal pharmacist, Tayside Primary Care Trust), Aileen Douglas, MRPharmS (community pharmacist), Mark Jenkins, MRPharmS (community pharmacist), Robert Lindsay, MRPharmS (community pharmacist) Andrew McGuire, MRPharmS (practice pharmacist), Leslie Simms, MRPharmS (community pharmacist), Karen White, MRPharmS (community pharmacist)

A scheme to support social services in caring for patients with medication problems was the winning entry in the community care section. The particular group of patients with such problems were elderly and dependent on a range of other services.

Following referral from a social care team assessment worker, community pharmacists visited patients at home and assessed their medication use and problems. The problems identified included those involving adverse reactions and medication reviews as well as problems with patients’ environments. Through the scheme community pharmacists had the ability to refer to other members of the health team when additional health or social care issues were identified.

So far within Northwest Perthshire, 245 elderly patients have been identified as having medication-related problems and have been referred to pharmacists by the social care team. These patients are currently being visited by pharmacists from five community pharmacy practices and data are being collected to evaluate the care provided.

Plans to extend the scheme have been incorporated in the priorities for the Perth and Kinross Local Health Care Co-operative. As the scheme is extended, further work includes investigating the effects of this intervention on the health care outcomes of the elderly.

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Shared Care finalist

Care at the Chemist relieves GP workload

Minor ailment management at the community pharmacy: a question of access

Fiona Bates, MRPharmS (pharmaceutical adviser, Sefton Health Authority), Karen Hassell (senior research fellow, school of pharmacy, University of Manchester), Kieran Murphy (general practitioner, Moore Street Surgery, Liverpool) et al

Offering patients an opportunity to be seen by a community pharmacist rather than by a GP or nurse can relieve some of the workload on GP practices, a project run under the title “Care at the Chemist” has found.

During a six-month period, 576 patients who were exempt from prescription charges took the opportunity to see a community pharmacist about minor ailments. Pharmacists could prescribe from a formulary of non-prescription medicines. The transfer of work represented a 38 per cent shift for these conditions from GPs to community pharmacy. Mothers with young children were among those making most use of the scheme.

Results from the study have been published in The Pharmaceutical Journal (March 31, pp425–8) and have recently been accepted for publication in the British Medical Journal.

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Community Care finalist

Pharmacists provide 24-hour on-call service for palliative care

Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust community pharmacy palliative care network

Harry McQuillan, MRPharmS (Lothian pharmacy locality group co-ordinator), Catherine Kelly, MRPharmS (community pharmacy development pharmacist), Helen Wright, MRPharmS (palliative care pharmacist), Angela Kerr, MRPharmS (community pharmacy employee), Pamela Chisholm, MRPharmS (community pharmacy employee), Alan Glauch, MRPharmS (community pharmacy contractor), John Taylor, MRPharmS (community pharmacy contractor), Mohammed Sarwar, MRPharmS (community pharmacy contractor), Catriona Forth, MRPharmS (community pharmacy employee), Patricia Murray, MRPharmS (chief pharmacist, Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust)

A 24-hour, on-call supply and advice service is being provided by community pharmacies in the Lothian area.

Initially the scheme was set up to provide such a service for an agreed list of palliative care medicines for other health care professionals, patients and carers.

Six community pharmacies were involved and an out-of-hours rota service set up between them.

To support the introduction of the service, a pack including the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network recommendations was produced and distributed to participating pharmacies.

The service has now been expanded to include an agreed list of medicines for all prescriptions.

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Hospital Care winner

Monitoring system brings consistent approach to clinical pharmacy

The development and implementation of a performance monitoring system for clinical pharmacy

Dorothy Hughes, MRPharmS (associate chief pharmacist), Anne Kinnear, MRPharmS, (principal pharmacist), Karen Reid, MRPharmS (principal pharmacist), Laura Shaw, MRPharmS (senior pharmacist). Lothian University Hospitals NHS Trust, Edinburgh

The winning team, based at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, have developed and implemented a performance monitoring system for clinical pharmacy. Karen Reid, principal pharmacist, presenting the work, explained that before the introduction of the monitoring system, there had been no consistent approach and each directorate pharmacist concentrated on their own area of responsibility.

The team put together a method of assessing the consistency of the standardised approach within pharmacist directorate teams and the clinical service overall. Such an assessment tool had not been available before, either at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh or elsewhere in the trust. The audit tool collated data from all areas and allowed the clinical service to be assessed objectively for the first time. The system includes standards for the whole range of clinical pharmacy activities and also provides a means of assessing performance against the standards. In this way, priority areas for development can be developed.

The tool covers all the major components of the clinical pharmacy service: organisational structure, professional development, pharmaceutical care, clinical effectiveness and formulary management, medicines information.

The implementation of the monitoring system has had a major impact on the overall standard of the clinical pharmacy service and is an important management information tool which has been shown not only to develop a strategy for continuous quality improvement, but also to improve patient care.

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Hospital Care finalist

Pharmacists can educate patients with diabetes

The pharmacist-led type 2 diabetic clinic: a new delivery of care system for pharmacists.

Labib Tadros, MRPharmS (clinical specialist pharmacist), Margaret Ledger-Scott, MRPharmS (chief pharmacist), Ted Barnes (consultant endocrinologist), Darlington Memorial Hospital

Presenting the entry, Labib Tadros explained that the aim of their study had been to evaluate the impact on the glycaemic control of patients with type 2 diabetes when a clinical pharmacist provides direct patient care. The study had found that the education of diabetic patients is the cornerstone of therapy and that a pharmacist can play an important role in this area.

The pharmacist-led diabetic clinic had also significantly contributed to better glycaemic control and thus to a reduction in diabetic complications and hospital admissions.

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