Park Avenue Pharmacy Quality Account – June 2010

Introduction

Park Avenue Pharmacy has been serving the local community in its current location since the 1930s. We employ around 15 staff who do a variety of different things, from advising on minor health problems and healthy lifestyles, dispensing prescriptions, through to delivering medication to patients in their own home.

When we provide services to our community, especially those we provide on behalf of the NHS, we try to focus on three things.

Firstly, we want our services to be clinically effective for people. If for example, we give advice on treatments for health problems, those treatments should work. To ensure this, all our staff are trained at least as far as the standards required by the professional body which regulates community pharmacy, and we know that learning never stops.

Secondly, we want our services to be safe. For example, when we dispense prescriptions, we not only need to ensure that we do this accurately, we also need to check if all medication prescribed is appropriate. We take into account many things such as your age or other medication you may take, because things like this can have a big bearing on how safe a treatment is for you. Again, training plays a big part in keeping things safe, but we also have a range of standard procedures which all staff know and understand.

Periodically, we are inspected by the local NHS Primary Care Trust and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society who help to ensure that our standards of clinical effectiveness and safety are high.

Thirdly, we want you to be satisfied with the experience of using our pharmacy. We believe we go out of our way to provide an excellent service no matter what you come to us for. We carry out regular patient surveys and take notice of any changes you would like to see. For example, a recent survey suggested that people wanted a more private area to talk to the pharmacist, and as a result we refitted the pharmacy and now have a private consultation room. Your experience of our services are just as important to us as effectiveness and safety, because if people enjoy the experience then they are more likely to continue to use Park Avenue Pharmacy.

A modern community pharmacy provides a much wider range of NHS services than would have been the case only a few years ago, and the list is growing. This is because the NHS is recognising the ways in which community pharmacies can help people lead healthier and better lives, and at the same time take some of the pressure off other NHS services. Did you know for example that you can come to us and stop smoking, with everything you need under one roof? You can also book an appointment with our pharmacist for a full medicines use review, where we can help to make sure all your medication – no matter whether on prescription or not - is right for you.

A full range of services is available in our practice leaflet.

Prescription Collection and Delivery

Park Avenue Pharmacy was the first pharmacy in Redcar (and one of the first in the country) to offer a home delivery service for prescriptions. This means that anyone who chooses to can ask us to order, collect, dispense and deliver their medication either by making one phone call or sending an email. Whilst this service is obviously convenient, it also means that anyone who is housebound has one less thing to worry about. For those who prefer to collect their medication from the pharmacy, we also offer a very popular collection only service – again with just one call or email. Our latest satisfaction survey Over 99% of people said they were happy with our overall service.

Support for people who have difficulties taking their medicines

Many people take a wide range of different medications in order to help manage their health. In many cases, knowing what to take and when can be daunting, and there are sadly examples of people needing to go into hospital because of problems taking medication. There are a number of ways we help people in this position, but one of the most common is to supply medicines in a pre-packed compliance aid. Compliance aids organise all medications into one simple package so that it is much easier for people to cope. This improves the safety and effectiveness of prescribed medicines and also takes stress and worry away form both patients and carers alike.

Advice on Minor Ailments

An important part of the role of a modern community pharmacy is to advise people with minor health problems. More and more people turn to pharmacies to get good quality advice quickly, and if necessary privately. Pharmacists have trained for a minimum of four years and know a great deal about minor health problems, and just as importantly, when to refer you on to your doctor. We believe this is something we do well – indeed in our most recent survey, those that responded said that they rated the pharmacists and staff at 100%.

Promote our ‘stop smoking’ service.

For smokers, stopping smoking the best thing you can do to improve your health, no matter what your current health is like, or how long you have smoked. The NHS recently recognised that pharmacies were an ideal place to offer ‘stop smoking’ services, and the success rates nationally compare very well with other settings such as the GP surgery. Many pharmacies locally now offer this much needed service.

We have been providing our ‘stop smoking’ service since the beginning of 2009. The service is very convenient with everything under one roof, has flexible appointment times and is provided by our own well trained and motivated ‘stop smoking’ advisers. We have recently trained a third adviser and will soon be able to offer the service to pregnant women.

The people who have used the service have done well, and we have a favourable quit rate in comparison with others. However, we haven’t had as many people accessing the service as we would have liked. One aim for this year is to make more people aware of the service and to double then number we help to stop smoking.

Promote Healthy Lifestyles

Many of the diseases and causes of the modern age are caused or made worse by the way we live – our lifestyle. Poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption have a big impact, not just on our quality of life, but also on our life expectancy.

Community pharmacy as part of its contract with the NHS is charged with helping people to live healthier lifestyles. We believe we can do more to help with this, and hope to take part in locally organised campaigns to raise awareness of major health problems such as obesity, or helping with the early detection of cancer.

We would like to play an active role in all 6 local pharmacy public health campaigns.

We will need some help and leadership from our local Primary Care Trust (the NHS body that commissions and oversees all NHS services) to do this, and look forward to working with them.

Do More Medicines Use Reviews

Medicines Use Reviews (MURs) are a relatively new service in community pharmacy. They are available across the country in most pharmacies, and we have been offering them for around 3 years. The idea of the service is for individuals to be able to sit down with the pharmacist and discuss in detail how to get the best not just from prescribed medicines, but also any other medicines or dietary supplements you may take. Research shows that many medicines are not taken correctly or not taken at all and this can lead to bigger problems if not dealt with, as well as wasting valuable NHS resources. One MUR we carried out recently showed that a patient was unable to use the inhaler they had been prescribed properly, which meant they were getting regular chest problems. By recommending that the doctor change to a different type of inhaler which was easier to use, we were able to improve the quality of life of the person concerned.

We want you to have as much knowledge and help as you need to get the best out of your medicines, and to date we have found MURs a useful way of improving this. We have not done as many MURs as we would have liked, so our aim is to promote the service better to people and to ensure we have sufficient pharmacist time to carry them out. By the end of the year we would like to have carried out twice as many MURs as last year.

Conclusion

Our aim at Park Avenue Pharmacy is to provide high quality services to anyone who chooses to come to us. By listening to our patients and customers and employing well trained high quality staff in a professional environment, we will build on our strong base and improve quality still further.

Statement from NHS Middlesbrough

NHS Middlesbrough, as the lead commissioner for services provided by Park Avenue Pharmacy, welcomes the opportunity to comment on this quality report and the approach that the Pharmacy has taken to its development in this first year.

The PCT can corroborate that to the best of its ability, it can confirm that the information provided within the Quality Report is an accurate and fair reflection of the performance of Park Avenue Pharmacy in 2009/10.

As commissioner, it is vital that the services we commission are actively engaged with the quality improvement agenda and in particular to providing safe, effective care along with the best possible patient experience. The PCT feels that this report demonstrates how Park Avenue Pharmacy is aligned to this agenda and deserves recognition for placing patient experience as a high priority and by acting to make quality improvements to services based on patient feedback.

The PCT views the work undertaken in 2009/10 including the development of this quality report as laying a very good foundation from which to progress further work in 2010/11 and looks forward to continuing this constructive approach to promoting quality improvement.