Journal of Pharmacy Management - Jan 2022

Journal of Pharmacy Management • Volume 38 • Issue 1 • January 2022 Overcoming challenges in communicating with practices It was important for our team to overcome any communication challenges early on and to ensure that any contact we did have with practices was able to add value to the practice team and patients. We continually asked ourselves, “how can we provide support to practices which will reduce their workload?”. The following five-point approach successfully improved our engagement with practices: 1) Add value We identified early on the pressures within practices from patients chasing repeat prescriptions or putting inmultiple requests for repeat prescriptions. To tackle this, we put together a support package that explained how to increase the number of patients on repeat dispensing by utilising the national electronic repeat dispensing (e-RD) approach. This was delivered in two ways; firstly, through a support package consisting of an electronic written guide to explain which patients would be considered as ‘ideal’ for e-RD and how to set these patients up on e-RD, and secondly, by contacting practices to offer to carry out this work for them. This helped to re-establish relationships and demonstrate that we were there for practices, to continue supporting them and their patients. 2) Utilise technology Our organisation was an early adopter of the online communication platform Microsoft® Teams and had been using this tool for 12 months before the pandemic hit. Alongside this, the MO team was accustomed to the largemajority of staff working in an agile way, which included working across multiple sites on a shared platform, communicating effectively using virtual resources and working across different workstreams. We were able to share our experience of usingMicrosoft® Teams, alongside email and telephony systems, with practice colleagues so that they could quickly identify best practice and benefits for their own use. 3) Establish peer support networks Recognising the pressures emergency situations can create, we were keen to support practice and PCN pharmacists and pharmacy teams. Working with our contacts, we opened our support networks, utilising platforms such as Microsoft® Teams, to create online groups. We kept our virtual groups as informal, weekly Figure 1: Improving engagement with practices: A five-point approach 27