Wider engagement with pharmacists could yield benefits

Wider engagement with community pharmacists which could deliver a range of new services with the appropriate IT support and access to electronic records is being ignored by the NHS IT programme in England, according to a pharmacy body.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) has told an inquiry into the future of pharmacy that access to shared electronic records for community pharmacists could significantly reduce adverse drug reactions that lead to hospital admissions and reduce associated morbidity.

In its response to the inquiry into the future of pharmacy by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Pharmacy the RSPGB calls for engagement to extend beyond NHS Connecting for Health’s electronic prescription service.

It says: “Currently, the engagement in England is focusing almost exclusively on the electronic transfer of prescriptions, but is largely ignoring wider engagement.”

David Pruce, director of practice and quality improvement at the RPSGB, said it was unclear when or if the Department of Health intended to consult on access to the NHS Care Records Service by community pharmacists.

He told EHI Primary Care: “Pharmacists advise patients about their medicines and to a certain extent at the moment they are having to guess what’s wrong with the patient and answer questions without knowing the full picture.”

Pruce said that pharmacists were taking on much more of a clinical role as they became more involved in medicines management and were able to prescribe and as a result needed access to appropriate information about the treatment of patients via links with both primary and secondary care.

He added: “When a patient goes from primary care to secondary care it would be helpful for the pharmacist working in secondary care to know the issues that patient has, highlighted by a medicines use review (MUR) done by the community pharmacist. Similarly when a patient is discharged from hospital a community pharmacist could benefit from knowing what sort of supportive measures have been put in place by secondary care.”

Pruce said pharmacy IT systems would also need an overhaul to deliver the kind of services needed for the future and enable pharmacists to share information with other health professionals.

The society is to begin a study in the next month or so looking at how pharmacy IT systems need to change and expects to reach some conclusions by the end of the year.

Other points raised in the submission to the parliamentary inquiry include a call for community pharmacists to be able to send MURs electronically to GP practices and for GP systems to include new functionality so that the reviews can be integrated into patient records.

Pruce said: “GPs are currently getting fed up with the number of forms they are receiving from pharmacists which they then have to scan in and even then it’s not really useful as it’s not integrated into the main record.”

The society also wants to see pharmacists have better access to online resources such as the National electronic Library for Health.

Pruce added: “At the moment pharmacists are treated as not quite in the NHS and it’s difficult to get an Athens password. If the idea is to integrate pharmacists and give them a clinical role they have got to be part of the NHS and recognised as that. GPs are independent contractors and it’s the same for pharmacists.”