Journal of Pharmacy Management - Jan 2022

Access to the record is very valuable, but I think sometimes its importance is a bit overplayed. If you've got a 25-year-old woman in front of you who tells you that she's got no medical history and she's got a UTI, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with her normally, and she didn't take any medicines, there's no need to look in a record to know how to treat that. The important thing about record access for me is the write access, which is something we haven't got. We are working on it, but most of our services now will send an electronic summary to the GP or will print out a standard letter which is then posted. We're starting to get some noise from the GP's about the admin work. They have to download the report, code it and put it into their records. And to be fair, they don't seem to be ignoring them. They do seem to be putting them into the patient record, and it's quite important they do, so that people with ADRs get identified. But I think it's starting to create a mindset among some GP's. Why can't you just have direct access tomy records and put it all in there? GB: What impact do you expect the service to have on GP workload? AM: You save them an appointment which is quickly taken up by the next person in the queue. It's not as if they're going to be sat twiddling their thumbs so it's not going to free up a huge amount of capacity in the surgery. The main benefit of this is for out of hours and A&E, and it's about things not spilling over into unscheduled care. Few surgeries have appointments left after about 10:00. They're already booking up tomorrow's so if the pharmacies around them can pick up a few consultations that means a few people won't have got to the end of the day not being seen. I think 96%of people that used the service in the first year said they would have gone to their GP or out of hours or A&E if it had not been available. We wouldn't put them through the service if it could be managed with a bit of paracetamol. Generally they are something that the pharmacy couldn't deal with without this service. We’re not attracting The Walking Well into this who just want some reassurance for something that they wouldn't have bothered with if the service hadn't been available, which is one of the concerns we have. We don't advertise the service too openly, so the level of provision is still quite low, but that's partly because we don't want to create demand that can't be met in the pharmacies or create demand in the wrong sort of patient. GB: So how does it work? AM: It depends on the local setup, in some cases the pharmacist just deals with walk-in patients, but where there are good working relationships with the local practice, there is more structured referral. In one example, a GP practice will collate a list of patients each morning, usually 55 or so, who called for an appointment and say, well, we could get the pharmacist to see you. Would you be happy with that? If yes, they put them on the list. They send that over to the pharmacy who then ring the patients, usually by about 10:00. They get a phone call from the pharmacist. Sometimes he'll just deal with it over the phone and say, “I've done a prescription for you. Come down and collect it or send somebody else.” He will book others into slots during the day. Journal of Pharmacy Management • Volume 38 • Issue 1 • January 2022 33

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