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

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PSNC pilots are ready to go live nationally

Pharmacists involved in the Community Pharmacy Medicines Management Project say they are only waiting for approval from local ethics committees before going live.

John Dixon, project manager for the pilot schemes, which are being led by a consortium headed by the PSNC, said he thought pharmacists would be able to begin approaching patients to take part in the trial during the next couple of weeks. "We achieved MREC [Multi-centre Research Ethics Committee] approval towards the end of December, and are now going through the local ethics committees. We must have the agreement of the local ethics committees before patients can be invited to take part in the study — it is not just a rubber stamping process," he said.

The next steps will involve examining local coronary heart disease registers from general practices for suitable patients in each of the nine areas in the trial. "The practice will then write to patients to seek their approval to take part in the study, and hopefully we will have a positive response," said Mr Dixon, adding the patient organisations had welcomed the study.

Juanita Westbury, local research co-ordinator for the Nantwich pilot said that their scheme was now waiting for local approval: "All of the six pharmacies in the town have been to the training meetings but we haven't started collecting data or inviting patients yet," said Ms Westbury.

She added that the scheme would be collecting data about the medicines patients with coronary heart disease were taking, noting their lifestyle factors and cholesterol level, and asking about concordance with their medications. "We hope to be able to address any concerns that they might have about how they feel about taking the medicine — we will not be doing any clinical measurements at all."

Mr Dixon said the trial aimed to approach about 3,000 patients across the nine pilot sites. About 1,800 patients are needed to power the study — 1,200 in the intervention group and 600 controls. He added that because the trial focused on repeat prescribing, most patients would be regular users of the pharmacies taking part in the trial. "We're certainly not going to direct people to go to a particular pharmacy. The patient will be asked to make a first appointment with the pharmacist to sit down and have a consultation about their medication, looking for adverse drug reactions, what the patient might be buying OTC that might clash with their prescribed medicine, are there any clashes with other medications or side effects and so on."

The trial will also try look at how happy GPs, pharmacists and patients are with the service. "GPs are beginning to realise that they are not making as much use of the expertise in pharmacies as they could be. What we're trying to do is to establish an evidence base that this type of service can be delivered by a typical community pharmacy," he added.