The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7187 p272
2 March 2002

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Welcome recognition [more]
Prescription endorsement needs overhaul [more]

Welcome recognition

NHS Direct in England and Wales and NHS 24 in Scotland are at last putting pharmacy into the mix with the appointment of pharmacy advisers in the three home countries. When NHS Direct was launched, the planners seriously underestimated the number of calls that would be made about medicines use.

Why did they not conduct some research to ascertain the sorts of questions that might be asked before the service was launched? — but then politicians have never been too keen on determining the evidence base for their schemes. That aside, we welcome the recognition that pharmacy has now been given and that it is accepted as an important part of the framework for delivering telephone advice (p281 and p289 PDF* 75K).

In Scotland, where the first part of the three-phase roll-out of NHS 24 will start shortly, call-handlers will have the option of recommending a visit to a pharmacist as part of the protocol. In England and Wales this option will not be fully integrated into the service until later in the year. Call-handlers are trained to answer simple medication questions themselves, or refer tricky questions to medicines information centres.

Now that these services have proper pharmacy input, other members of the profession might be keen to become trainers of call handlers. Interested hospital pharmacists can offer their services via their local medicines information centres and community pharmacists via their local pharmaceutical committees. Primary care trust pharmacists should approach their local NHS Direct/24 centre. There are plans for call centre staff and community pharmacies to liaise so that nurses can better understand what services are available in the community, and so that pharmacists can spend time in call centres to experience first-hand the sorts of questions that are asked. This can only be good for pharmacy in the wider health community.

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Prescription endorsement needs overhaul

Endorsing prescriptions correctly so as to receive the appropriate amount of remuneration has long been a bit hit or miss. The National Health Service's counter fraud team is currently cracking down on some of what it sees as the most common abuses of the system (see p273). However, the whole system needs to be simplified and made more transparent. Too many of the current rules are unpublished or unclear. A simpler, and fairer, system will remove many of the opportunities for error or worse.

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  * PDF files on PJ Online require Acrobat Reader 4 or later.