Pharmacist wins national primary care professional of the year award
Pam Grant, right, with health minister Lord Warner and health secretary
Patricia Hewitt at the ceremony |
Pam Grant, a pharmacist in Dorset, has been named primary care professional
of the year at the Department of Health’s 2005 Health and Social
Care Awards held in London last week.
Ms Grant won the award for a project that she set up to provide tailored
medicines management for patients with complex health needs. She is employed
by Poole Primary Care Trust and is part of a multidisciplinary, community-based
intermediate care team.
Ms Grant goes into patients’ homes to review their medicines, assess
their ability to take the medicines correctly and find solutions to any
problems.“The solution could be paying a community pharmacist to
supply the patient’s medicines in a monitored dosage system and
liaising with home care support or social services,” she said.
“Over two years, I demonstrated that I could prevent one in six
emergency hospital admissions,” said Ms Grant. This convinced Poole
PCT to fund the project fully. It now involves two pharmacists and four
pharmacy technicians. Patients are referred to the service from community
pharmacists, hospitals, GPs, district nurses and other members of the
intermediate care team. The team provides ongoing management for 50 patients.
Ms Grant plans to spend the £15,000 award on further evaluating
the project. She will carry out a patient satisfaction survey, and rerun
the hospital admission/discharge analysis to see how many admissions have
been avoided through her team’s interventions. She will also evaluate
savings made to prescribing costs through stopping medicines and using
patients’ stocks of medicines before reordering. “I believe
pharmacists should be working with patients first and prescribers second,
and that will take a cultural change,” said Ms Grant.
Two other pharmacy-related projects reached the final of the national
awards after winning regional awards earlier this year (PJ,
23 July, p106).
Members of a hospital medicines management collaborative team at Nottingham
City Hospital were finalists in the patient safety award category.The
team designed and developed a patient-focused patient’s own medicines
bag for use when patients attend hospital, their GP or any other health
care professional.The bag reminds patients to take their prescribed and
over-the-counter medicines with them to their appointment. It contains
information on allergies, patient history and prescription reminders and
tells patients to ask for up-to-date printed information.
Karen Rosenbloom and Ruth Goldstein, pharmacists at Hertfordshire PCT
and Burntwood, Lichfield and Tamworth PCT, respectively,were both runners-up
in the primary care professional of the year category for their work developing
key resources to support vulnerable people.The work has resulted in an
assessment tool to support community pharmacists’ adherence to the
Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
The Health and Social Care Awards attracted more than 1,400 applications
and 16 categories were judged by service improvement experts from the
NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, the Department of Health
and the Royal College of General Practitioners. |
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