Journal of Pharmacy Management - Jan 2022

Journal of Pharmacy Management • Volume 38 • Issue 1 • January 2022 another 18 that are ready to be commissioned and for one reason or another we're still working through, so they'll probably be live very soon. GB: 61 out of a total of…? AM: Something like 750. Then there are 62 in training, so if you add those together, that’s 123 that are either commissioned or potentially going to be commissioned in the next 6 to 12 months. GB: So those 21,500 consultations have been provided in 43 pharmacies – that’s an average of 500 each. AM: It's quite variable actually, but some of them are doing more than a hundred a month whilst others are doing thirty a month. But the main problem with roll out is about availability of Designated Prescribing Practitioners (DPP). Between a third and half of the independent prescribing courses now allow a pharmacist or a nurse to act as DPP, but you need to be qualified for three years, and because of the timelines of what we're doing here very few of our pharmacist prescribers in community have done three years yet. I understand th at HEIW ha ve an aspiration that every pharmacist that's currently on the register in Wales will have the opportunity to train as a prescriber before 2026 when the new graduates come through. So you can see that they've got to ramp it up a little bit, but alongside that we've got Advanced Nurse Practitioners (ANPs) training as prescribers, we've got paramedics, we've got podiatrists, all pulling on the same pool of existing DPPs. There is a real pressure. We feel it particularly in North Wales, because we have a workforce shortage anyway. HEIW are currently working on how do we support people to become DPPs? I suspect probably in two or three years we will have quite a workforce of DPP's amongst the pharmacists, but at the moment I'm not aware of anybody that's put themselves forward as a DPP for anyone, and it's going to take a little bit of time, but it's likely that we will hit that 2030 target. Maybe by 2027-28, because after 2026 all of our new graduates will be prescribers on day one. Looking ahead, I'd like to see a collaborative approach to how we bring on the workforce in respect of prescribing in Wales. Something involving HEIW alongside universities that has similarities to the Medical Deanery model. It works very well inmedicine because it means you've got continued training beyond the university, whereas in pharmacy you get to the end of university and then there's a mixed bag and no real structure. You can pay for courses but we don't have that structure, and I think we do need that, especially when we think about prescribers. We need a way to bring them from doing UTIs and sore throats to long term condition management. And how do you identify somebody with 31