NPA and PCA to support MUR evaluations

Home > PJ (current issue) > News / News Centre | Search

The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7496 p386
5 April 2008

This article
Reprint Photocopy

Acrobat Reader

NPA and PCA to support MUR evaluations

Plans to support pharmacists to undertake medicines use reviews and evaluate their success have been hatched by the National Pharmacy Association and the Primary Care Pharmacists’ Association.

The programme, due to start in June 2008, is the first collaboration between the two associations. Pharmacists who become involved will undergo training to improve their understanding of the core principles of MURs, to help them better manage their time and staff and to develop their communication skills.

As part of the project these pharmacists will feed back data for evaluation (see Panel below).

Evaluation of the programme

The National Pharmacy Association and the Primary Care Pharmacists’ Association plan to evaluate the medicines use reviews using:

• Quality of service measures, using patient feedback analysis, assessment of the quality of GP referrals and community pharmacists’ assessment of their service

• Process measures, for example, number of MURs completed, number and types of recommendations to patients, and number of referrals or recommendations to GPs

• Value for money, by measuring the amount of wastage or over-ordering by patients

The programme will not be an in-depth research project to prove the worth of MURs and is not an attempt to go beyond the scope of the advanced service specifications, PCPA chairman Shailen Rao told the press at a briefing this week.

“We are trying to look at the context that brings this training to life, and that gets people to write interventions, record their activity and provide something for us to evaluate,” he explained.

The associations are calling for four sites in England and Wales to be involved, each of which will need to name a project lead from within the primary care organisation (PCO) or local pharmaceutical committee (LPC). Mr Rao added that the sites will each be required to recruit a minimum of 15 pharmacies to the project.

He said: “What community pharmacists will get is skills, knowledge and practical support through the project facilitator, and what the PCOs get is the support from us to run the project.”

The NPA and the PCPA are asking PCOs and LPCs to make a joint application to join the project.

Further information is available from Michelle Kaulbach at michelle@pharmacomm.co.uk