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Pharmacy Initiatives Supporting COVID-19 Pandemic Response

Supporting leadership for NHSE Pharmacy Cells

Production of shared guidance and PMO Pharmacy leadership for End of Life Care, Care Homes (North West Cell) and website information.

Example of outputs: https://itservices.midlandsandlancashirecsu.nhs.uk/mmo-hub-coronavirus-guidance/

Impact

  • Stopped duplication across North West CCGs, high quality outputs.
  • No boundary CCG issues for patients
  • This can continue where there is a partnership for CSU and NHSE regions (NW as model).

Daily stock tracker for palliative care networks

Provision of daily stock check trackers for local palliative care and community network

Covers Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Sandwell CCGs.

Impact

  • Provides clear information at 4pm, six days a week of stock levels across palliative care pharmacies
  • Resolves ongoing problem of community/palliative care staff and patients’ families spending time seeking end of life drugs out of hours (continual problem for years)
  • Possibility to make less resource intensive by developing into a more automated system
  • Very well received - many testimonials from palliative care consultants and networks on benefits of this daily information – where this has worked out of hours.
Just to let you know this information was really helpful at the weekend, (with the addition of the Whatsapp group) to get end of life medicines, particularly Oxycodone, to a rapidly deteriorating patient. This information really helps our response times and saves the family trying to locate medicines.”

Jo Bartlett | Specialist Clinical Pharmacist, Non Medical Prescriber, John Taylor Hospice
“This data is invaluable, I have had a couple of incidences where I came on shift at 7am and the night community responders at the hospice have commented on needing to sort medicines asap as a patient has deteriorated overnight. In both cases I was able to check the spreadsheet from the evening before and give information for which pharmacy had stock once the prescription was sorted which meant speedy access to medicines.” 

Michelle Aslett | Specialist Palliative Care Pharmacist & Independent Prescriber, Marie Curie Hospice

At-scale project to support roll out of Electronic Prescribing (EPS) and eRepeat Dispensing (eRD) in East & West Midlands

This project has been done as partnership to support East and West Midlands Academic Health Science Networks and Arden and Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit. MLCSU led the project management and provided the expertise, resources and communications and pharmacy leadership.

This is scalable – nationally and we will be engaging NW region next with this.

Outputs include:

  • Webinars – over 600 attended; lot of front line staff from primary care – MLCSU supported with Chair, communications to run the webinar-technical, project-led the process and managed stakeholders.
  • NHS Futures platform – MLCSU supplied a large amount of tools and resources and manages the content. We have used this to help share our resources widely from our work across large numbers of CCGs developed over the last few years
  • Inbox Helpline – MLCSU host this for the project group.

Impact

There has been much interest across the Midlands. This delivers better uptake of EPS and eRD and significantly reduces GP practice workload.

EPS and eRD expert pharmacy delivery team

This team is delivering increased uptake of EPS and eRD.

Initially targeted at Wolverhampton CCG, the team is also delivering this for CCGs in Wirral and Lancashire.

This involves working with GP practices, remote access to patient system (with information governance approval) to engage patients to move them to electronic prescribing systems and/or eRepeat dispensing.

Impact

  • Able to provide a full service to engage and train practice staff, complete system searches, agree strategy for change and deliver workload to change patients working with the GPs.