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Contact details
Anyone interested in being enrolled in the community
safety messaging scheme, or finding out more information about
it, can contact
Roger Booth on 01633 245291 or e-mail him at roger.booth@gwent.pnn.police.uk |
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The pharmacy officer’s role
Mr Booth has been pharmacy officer for Gwent since November 2005.
All the police forces in Wales have similar posts, he explains,
although some have other titles, such as Controlled Drug inspectors
or Controlled Drug officers. The role principally involves examining
the security and documentation for Controlled Drugs.
“I
found when I started that many community pharmacies in the area
hadn’t had a crime prevention survey, so the first thing
I did was to introduce the service to the community pharmacies.”
A
crime prevention survey is a site-specific survey looking at
the building, the locality and the shop layout. Nearly all
the pharmacies in the area have now had a security and crime prevention
survey. Mr Booth is now providing personal safety advice for
pharmacists. He is looking at how they can ensure their personal
safety during the private consultation process, both in terms
of their behaviour and the layout of the consultation room.
This
advice is provided, Mr Booth emphasises, free of charge. |
Gwent Police has had a community safety messaging system for about five
years but, until Roger Booth took up the role of pharmacy officer for
the force in November last year, it had mainly been used to communicate
with neighbourhood watch groups. Mr Booth, however, realised that pharmacists
could benefit from similar messages and in January he began to promote
the system as a way of alerting them to local drug safety issues.
“I wrote to all the community pharmacies in the Gwent area explaining
about the system and how it worked and I enclosed enrolment forms with
the letter,” he says. “There was quite a poor return rate
on the letters, to be honest, but I wasn’t surprised by that — forms
like that can just sit on someone’s desk and then they end up at
the bottom of a pile of things to do. However, when I went round visiting
the pharmacists and putting the form in their hands, explaining the system
and asking them to sign up, we achieved almost complete coverage.”
Community safety broadcasts
The system allows Mr Booth to send out a voice message to all the enrolled
pharmacies in the area warning them about issues around drug and relevant
community safety issues. “As far as I know, this is the only
health care community safety broadcast system like this in the UK,” he
says.
Mr Booth records a message and the system then sends it to every telephone
number in its database. Each enrolled telephone then rings and, when
it is answered, the recorded message is played. The system calls four
times with each message in the event of the
telephone not being answered and people can also call back to hear the
message if they need to note down further details.
“If the message is relevant to someone, they can deal with it as
they see fit or, if it is not, they can just ignore it. No one needs to
pass
the information on to anyone else on the system, so there is no need
to worry about ‘Chinese whispers’ distorting the message,” Mr
Booth says. “The scheme is also entirely free so there are no cost
implications for those enrolled in the scheme.” Relevance
Mr Booth has control over who receives what information, and can target
a particular audience, so community pharmacists, for instance, will
only be sent information about pharmacy and the retail sector, because
they will all be enrolled in the system under the title of ‘pharmacy’. “The
system is all about providing relevant, quality-assured safety announcements — making
sure that the alerts we do send out are helpful to those who receive
them, rather than just flooding them with every announcement being
sent out,” he says.
Recent announcements have included ones covering heroin being cut with
cement, heroin contaminated with botulism and lost or stolen Physeptone
(methadone) prescriptions. “I was recently told by colleagues that
the organised crime part of the force had arrested 12 main drug dealers,” Mr
Booth adds. “That is something that pharmacists would not find
out about for some time through other routes, but it would have an effect
on the street scene for drugs like methadone. For instance, a patient
may be given a take-home supply of methadone for four or five days’ supply
at a time.
“If a local dealer is arrested, the street value of that supply will
increase and the patient will become vulnerable, so the patient’s
GP may decide that the patient should be prescribed a supply for supervised
daily consumption for some time after that. That can be important information
for pharmacists, which they would be unlikely to find out about from
other sources.”
The announcements follow a set script, along the lines of “Information
has been received that … ,” Mr Booth explains. This means that
there are no data protection issues and that those providing the service
with information do not need to worry about their safety being compromised. “The
payback from the system comes when we are contacted about a substance
which might be newly emerging as a product of abuse and can pass that
information on,” he says.
There are 128 community pharmacies in the Gwent area and almost all are
enrolled in the system. Mr Booth has also targeted the GPs who are the
most prolific methadone prescribers and the system also has seven GPs
enrolled, as well as the five local health boards, several community-based
day clinics and local prisons.
“The system has almost reached saturation point in terms of enrolment
of those groups, but I’m really keen for it to be a comprehensive
community service and there are certainly other groups who might want
find the service useful,” Mr Booth says.
“For instance, community pharmacy locums who work in the area might,
in particular, want to be able to receive the messages. Locums could register
a mobile number, so that they can receive the alerts wherever they are.
The advantage for them is that they then get to know the issues that
might come up when they are doing locums in the area,” he adds. Widening remit
Under the new Health Act, which came into force in July, Mr Booth has
the power of entry to GPs’ surgeries and hospitals— previously he had to go to hospitals by
invitation.
His role there will be essentially the same in terms of checking and
advising on the processing, auditing and security of Controlled Drugs,
but it will mean that his remit can be spread more widely. As a consequence
of the increased contact resulting from the new Act, Mr Booth intends
to introduce all GPs to the system, whether they prescribe methadone
or not. “Again this is a means of expanding the network,’ he
says.
“I’d also like to see the system develop as a way of communicating
information about emerging trends in abuse,” he adds. “At
the moment, there is no database on these emerging trends, so that is
something I’m interested in. For instance, a pharmacist who identifies
a rush on a particular product — a rush that can’t be explained
by things like seasonal variations — can get in contact with me.
“In isolation an unexpected rush may not be noteworthy, but if I
hear of a similar rush 10 miles away, then that is something I’d
want to look into and may want to send an alert out about. I could then
also
collate that sort of information centrally and
circulate it.” |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal