The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7169 p510-525
13 October 2001

BPC 2001 summary

Pharmaceutical care in the community

Outcomes of a collaborative course on community pharmaceutical care development were discussed by members of the Centres for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE) for England and Scotland.

The course was aimed at community pharmacists with the intention of developing local leaders who would encourage their colleagues to think about delivering pharmaceutical care during everyday practice.

“We wanted to show people that they already have the skills necessary to deliver pharmaceutical care rather than just give them a package to go away with,” said Alison Strath, chairman, Scottish Executive, Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Rob Swallow, assistant director for educational development, CPPE, said that pharmacists were closer to patients than any other health care professional. By helping pharmacists to look at the way they worked from a different perspective, existing practice could be put to better use. Course participants were required to work with an individual patient and, with their agreement, manage their medicines for a five-week period. Another assignment was to discuss with local general practitioners how to manage medicines and how this could be improved by joint working.

A discussion group had been set up on the CPPE website to help course participants to share their experiences. Because the CPPE and SCPPE had run the course, messages had been shared across Scotland and England, he said.

Many pharmacists had “clever tricks of the trade” when it came to helping patients manage their medicines, which they assumed everybody employed, Miss Strath said. However, other pharmacists had not necessarily thought of these tricks and it was important to share them. This would help to create a culture change in the profession and would stand pharmacists in good stead if the means of remuneration for services were changed in the future.

Professor Steve Hudson, University of Strathclyde, said that pharmacies serving a population should work together to serve local people and should work with other health care professionals to achieve this. This type of networking had begun to happen among the course participants. “Pharmacists who don’t want pharmaceutical care to happen are living dangerously,” he said.

Mr Swallow said that the progress of participants had been reviewed earlier this year and only one had had problems putting what they had learned into practice.

“People needn’t get it right first time,” Miss Strath said, “It will rarely be perfect to begin with but it is important that people give pharmaceutical care a go, keep going and learn from their mistakes. Projects need not be big either, they can start small and, as a pharmacist gains confidence, bigger projects can be tackled. If pharmaceutical care can be done at a local level, this will drive the national agenda.”

She added that when participants had mentioned to the website’s discussion group that something had gone badly, they had been relieved to find that other pharmacists on the course had had similar problems and could offer support and suggestions for dealing with situation better next time.

Mr Swallow said that pharmacists on the course had not been asked to document every single intervention but had documented examples of situations and how they had dealt with them. In the future, it would be useful for community pharmacists to have a means of documenting interventions on their computer system in such a way that they could be shared.

Other ways of helping pharmacists and other health care professionals to work together should also be identified and made known so that others could benefit from their colleagues’ experiences, he said.

Pharmacists who attended the Conference fringe meeting then discussed some of the issues raised. Some believed that greater co-operation between health care professionals in the community could be achieved if training was more multidisciplinary, because the relationship with colleagues from other professions would follow on from this automatically.

Back to Top