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Letters to the Editor
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Care homes
Pharmacists can help improve medicines management
From Mrs A. Morant, MRPharmS
The comment (PJ, 11 February, p155) from David Pruce, director of practice
and quality improvement at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, to the report
that care home staff are failing to administer drugs appropriately to
patients is totally negative. It ignores the opportunity for pharmacists
to carry out a useful task, raise the profile of the profession and also
(strange as it may seem) be remunerated for doing so.
Several years ago, I was one of a small group of pharmacists in north
west London who gave one day “teach-ins” to non-qualified
care home staff on medicines for their residents. The aim was to make
them better understand the whys and wherefores of the prescribed medicines
they were administering.
The outcome of this trial was that, where training had been given, the
accident rate with medicines fell by more than half. These sessions were
repeated in the following year but, unfortunately, they did not continue
owing to a lack of available funding.
Although I have not seen a cost-benefit analysis, and even ignoring the
benefit to patient health, I am certain that the savings in avoidable
hospital admissions and potential litigation would have outweighed the
cost of the training. This is, after all, how the bean counters view
everything. Unfortunately, managers are only interested in their own
targets and budgets and are not interested in benefits to the NHS overall.
Instead of washing his hands of the issue, Mr Pruce should be pointing
out that pharmacists are ideally qualified to carry out this training
and, in fact, are doing much of this type of work every day with patients
who visit the pharmacy. He would be able to point out the benefits primary
care trusts would obtain if they took a strategic view, looked at the
broader picture and then set up appropriate schemes.
Annette Morant
Edgware,
Middlesex
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal