The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7459 p10
7 July 2007

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Working together to achieve one aim

Pharmaceutical Care Awards

The Pharmaceutical Care Awards 2006 were presented at a celebratory dinner on 29 June 2007 at Apothecaries’ Hall, London. The dinner followed a conference at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s headquarters, where the finalists presented their projects to an audience of invited guests. The awards, organised by The Pharmaceutical Journal, are sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline and the Company Chemists’ Association

We are all members of professions who have a single aim and that is to benefit patients. We will do that far better if we respect each other's skills, if we share each other's competencies and we trust each other.

This was the message from Sir Cyril Chantler, chairman of the board of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust and of the King's Fund, London, who addressed the audience as the keynote speaker at the Pharmaceutical Care Awards for 2006.

He chose to speak about the relationship between pharmacists and doctors, further emphasising the message from last year’s keynote speaker, Niall Dickson, chief executive of King’s Fund, who discussed both withdrawing the boundaries between the professions and interprofessional co-operation.

Providing background on the topic, Sir Cyril discussed some of the history between the two professions, describing their relationship as not always easy.

He emphasised pharmacists’ expertise with medicines and discussed the specialist role pharmacists have in ensuring patients take medicines safely: “According to the information I have, on average, a quarter of a million patients each day receive advice from a pharmacist.” If patients are going to take medicines safely they need pharmacists’ help, he added.

Sir Cyril spoke about new endeavours that should make it easier for the professions to work together and reduce the likelihood of medical mishaps and adverse events. “The new IT system in the NHS should help to improve this by ensuring that each citizen … can have the medicines they are taking placed there so that they can reviewed by any heath practitioner,” he said.

Sir Cyril also spoke about a new electronic prescribing service at Great Ormond Street Hospital that, in a recent pilot study, resulted in a fall from 7 to 4 per cent in prescribing errors: “By linking this information to a pharmacopoeia we ought to also be able to reduce or eliminate errors in drug prescribing,” he said.

Sir Cyril discussed the way the public currently sees pharmacists and how doctors can improve patients’ confidence in pharmacists’ abilities. He described a recent article in the BMJ that revealed evidence that pharmacists involvement with the public does not always improve health outcomes.

It was found that although there were many opportunities for pharmacists to offer advice, this advice was often resisted or rejected by patients because of what they termed interactional difficulties, ie, the public did not trust the pharmacist as much as the doctor. “We doctors need to do much more to help our patients understand the work of a pharmacist rather than being overly protective of our professional role,” he said.

In emphasising the team approach to patient care, Sir Cyril, whose mother and grandfather were both pharmacists, proposed that there were six questions that a patient wanted answering:

• What is wrong?
• Why is it wrong?
• What can be done?
• What should be done?
• Who should do it?
• What can I expect?

“The first two questions are very much doctor questions — they are about diagnosis — although not solely so since other professionals can help in diagnosis. But the other four questions are ones that can be answered just as well, if not better, by other members of the team,” he said.