The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7188 p311-320
9 March 2002

This article
Reprint
Photocopy

News summary

Related websites
Calderdale and Kirklees NHS website (www.ckhealth.nhs.uk)

Calderdale sets out pharmacy strategy

Calderdale and Kirklees Health Authority has produced a strategy document spelling out local development opportunities for community pharmacy stemming from the pharmacy plan for England and how they could be implemented in its area.

Sheridan Teal, pharmaceutical adviser to Calderdale and Kirklees HA, explained that the health authority had been working on a pharmacy strategy from the days of the Pharmacy in a New Age process. The publication of the pharmacy plan in September 2000 had given a new impetus to this process.

Working groups involving representatives from the health authority, local pharmaceutical committee, acute trusts and the local branch of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society had been set up for each of the four main chapters of the pharmacy plan. Each of the working groups looked at what could be done locally and over what time-scale schemes could be implemented.

"What we were doing was brainstorming to produce practical ideas for our local area and looking at what other pharmacists were doing," Mrs Teal said.

The main strategy document contains five matrices which detail services that are already happening, projects that could be implemented in the short-term (within a year), medium-term (one to four years) or long-term (four to 10 years) and which body should implement them, and areas outside local control that could affect developments in the area. A meeting was held in July 2001 to discuss the matrices.

Following approval by the health authority and the four primary care groups in the area (which are to become primary care trusts in April), copies of the strategy document have been sent to local community pharmacists. Copies have also been sent to national pharmacy bodies and companies, Government offices, universities and social services departments.