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Website and conference
To complement the book, WiPP has produced a
website which
contains further tools and a training package.
The “Supporting
self care in primary care” book and website
will be launched at a WiPP conference in London on 31 October. “Self
care — turning rhetoric into reality” aims to show
how a sustainable self care strategy can be successfully integrated
into
primary care and to allow those involved in self care strategies
to find out about what other people have achieved and how they
have done it.
Further information is available from www.wipp.nhs.uk |
Next week, the Working in Partnership Programme (WiPP) will publish
a book, launch a website and host a conference, all focusing on self
care in primary care.
These three projects represent the fruit of over 18 months’ work
from the team behind WiPP’s “Self care for primary care” project,
Helena Stone, WiPP’s national project manager, self care for primary
care, says. “The ‘Self care for primary care’ project
aims to develop professions’ skills around self care so that patients
feel more empowered to undertake their own self care,” she explains.
Supporting self care in primary care
The major output of the “Self care for primary care” project
will be the “Supporting self care in primary care” book,
written by Ruth Chambers, professor of primary care at Staffordshire
University, Gill Wakley, visiting professor in primary care at Staffordshire
University, and Alison Blenkinsopp, professor of the practice of pharmacy
at Keele University, and with a foreword by David Colin-Thomé,
the Department of Health’s national clinical director for primary
care. The book aims to encourage interactive professional learning and
development, and to highlight the importance of, and benefits that can
result from, self care in the
workplace.
The book includes a number of “tools” to help with planning
and supporting self care, as well as examples of how self care can appear
from a patient’s perspective. The examples are used to examine
problems that can occur, to consider what can be done to improve the
system, to think about how to clarify who should be doing what and how
consistent self care messages can be conveyed.
However, the book is not meant to be over-prescriptive, Ms Stone stresses. “We
did not want the book to say ‘this is the way you must implement
self care’. Because there is so much variety across primary care
services, that would not have worked anyway,” she says. “What
we really want is for the book to give people ideas and to guide them
in building self care into their primary care strategy.”
Community pharmacy’s role
A whole chapter, by Professor Blenkinsopp, of the “Supporting self
care in primary care” book focuses on how community pharmacy teams
can design and implement a self care strategy.
She emphasises that pharmacy needs to work with other providers to make
self care work. “Pharmacy teams cannot promote self care in isolation
from other health care professionals and their teams, and it is more
important than ever that patients and the public receive consistent messages
about self care,” she writes.
She also looks in some detail at the role of self care in the new community
pharmacy contract in England and Wales, particularly the requirement
for pharmacy staff to record purchases and referrals that the pharmacist
deems to be clinically significant.
“This requirement for record keeping is the first time that there
has been an explicit acknowledgement of the role of pharmacy advice and
treatment
for self-limiting conditions within the NHS,” she stresses. “It
is also the first time that community pharmacy’s contribution to
clinical care has been
documented.”
The long-term value of recording such purchases and referrals will depend,
Professor Blenkinsopp argues, on whether pharmacists and other members
of the primary care team use the documentation when they follow up patients. “These
records will become increasingly important as more treatments for intermittent
and long-term conditions switch from prescription-only to over-the-counter
status,” she says. “Auditing records for what advice has
been given, and how, will enable pharmacists to review their standards
of care and safety and make plans for improvement.”
Professor Blenkinsopp also emphasises the importance of delivering consistent
messages on self care, a point that is also driven home in the illustrative
patient pathways included in the book.
“Community pharmacists are one source of advice and treatment about
minor illnesses in primary care,” Professor Blenkinsopp writes. But,
she adds, there are a wide and increasing variety of routes patients
could use in addition to community pharmacies. “Patients might
see their GP or a nurse in a general practice-based, nurse-led minor
illness clinic or a NHS walk-in centre or seek advice from the NHS direct
range of
services.”
However, the growing number of different settings and health professionals
involved in self care increases the risk of people receiving differing
advice, she says. She examines the ways in which patients might receive
conflicting messages about self care and puts forward the example of
patient information leaflets, produced by primary care trusts and shared
between pharmacies and GP surgeries, as one way of ensuring self-care
messages given to patients are consistent.
Ms Stone agrees that joining up work at GP surgeries and community pharmacies
is key to increasing the consistency of self care messages. “We
have tried in the book to connect practices with community pharmacy,” she
says. When a practice is starting a self care initiative, that should
be co-ordinated with what pharmacies are doing by, at the very least,
making pharmacists aware of the scheme or, for instance, by setting up
a patient group direction minor ailments service, she says.
The pharmacy chapter also provides a list of actions needed to “Make
it happen”, including the actions needed to develop self care in
the essential services of the community pharmacy contract in England
and Wales, self care roles and responsibilities within the pharmacy team,
patient and public awareness of new pharmacy services, quality and audit
arrangements and stronger links within primary care.
In particular, Professor Blenkinsopp recommends that pharmacy teams consider
nominating a member of staff to lead on self care support and that teams
should ensure that locums can provide seamless care and have relevant
accreditation for advanced services. She also suggests that pharmacy
teams could, together with local PCTs, produce a leaflet summarising
information about prescription-linked interventions, including details
of any changes that might be made to their prescriptions and of why these
changes may need to be made.
The ultimate aim of a strategy to support self care should be, Professor
Blenkinsopp argues, to create “a culture whereby supporting self
care is integral to all your developments and services, making the most
of local initiatives and the pharmacy contract”. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal