Medicines Management
Issue no 1, pp1-6
January/February 2002

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NI schemes hitting pharmacy targets

Medicines management schemes in Northern Ireland are well under way, say pharmacists involved in running the schemes, with each health and social services board hitting its targets to recruit one in five community pharmacies.

Under the plans for the province, each of the four health and social services boards holds an elective contract for providing a community based medicines review service. Dr Denis Morrison, director of pharmaceutical services, Northern Health and Social Services Board, Antrim, said: "It's going well, and each of the boards has met its target of 20 per cent of pharmacies, although not all of those have commenced their medication reviews with patients."

But Dr Morrison added that locum shortages were proving the main barrier to greater involvement by community pharmacies in doing the medication reviews. "The shortage of locums is certainly a problem here in Northern Ireland, and I've heard similar reports from elsewhere in the UK," he said.

"Here in this board we've already conducted well over 100 medication reviews, each of which takes between 30 minutes and an hour," Dr Morrison said. Because each pharmacy is only aiming to review 20 or so patients, the NI scheme is focusing on patients with major needs rather than performing less intensive but more widespread reviews. Dr Morrison said that overall it was not a huge time commitment for each pharmacy to undertake. "If we had a full uptake across Northern Ireland we would be talking about 100 pharmacies, so that's about 2,000 patients ultimately."

One of the schemes already up and running that has been agreed with the health and social services boards is a system that pays pharmacists £10 for monitoring drug levels, up to a maximum of five patients per pharmacy. "We already have a number of pharmacies claiming for this," said Dr Morrison.

Other initiatives include a plan to put the documentation relevant to NI medicines management schemes online, and to develop an interactive version that could be used in the field via a laptop computer. Dr Morrison said this would enable data to be collected without producing a summary of the care points in the review, and collated via the internet.