MORPh Associate Blog – Stacey Davidson

Hello I’m Stacey, a Pharmacist Lead in Primary Care in Greater Manchester & an Associate for MORPh Training. Some of you will have met me chairing MORPH study days in the North of England – mainly Manchester and the surrounding area & more recently on a little box on your computer/laptop/phones chairing the webinars.  I’m going to start writing in this blog about a few things I think Pharmacists in Primary Care might find interesting… happy to take suggestions in any feedback which you think may be useful.

A little about me & my current role: I am leading a team of Pharmacists, Senior PCN Lead Pharmacists, Pharmacy Technicians & Medicines Coordinators (our specifically trained admin support) in supporting our ~310,000 patients through our 37 GP practices across our 7 PCNs. Like all pharmacy teams working in primary care we are supporting GP practices & patients in safe prescribing & supply of medicines.

A very brief summary of my team’s current workload, which may give you some ideas on how you can support your practices, includes:

• Encouraging use of electronic prescription services & requesting across the whole system (inc. encouraging out of hours providers also)
• Supporting eRD (electronic repeat dispensing) across our practices – mainly starting on small items & with direction for NHS BSA provided lists
• Advising GP practices how to best enable patients for online access for booking appointments & requesting their repeat medication through e.g. Patient Access & the NHS App
• Reviewing & improving repeat prescribing processes in practices
• Providing EMIS searches to identify high risk drugs & reviewing if drug monitoring is up to date
• Structured medication review clinics (within Pharmacist’s confidence & competence & currently via telephone as face to face postponed)
• EMIS searches to identify patients that should be coded as high risk in COVID-19
• Reviewing patients on B12 to advise on plans for the next few months
• Liaising with GP practices on operationalising the warfarin to DOAC guidance by supporting a phased approach over the next 10-12 weeks in line with national guidance & in order of priority patients including starting with housebound patients
• We have an intermediate care facility set up locally at pace to support discharges from secondary care & our team support with medicines reconciliation upon admission to the unit & facilitate discharge out of the unit to ensure medicines are supplied in a timely & safe manner
• Some of our practices have our support with more complex hospital discharge letters for reconciliation
• Working with community pharmacies to improve communication & relationships
• Also provide clinical advice on clinical topics especially in this fast pace change due to COVID
• Supporting an improved system access to end of life medication

This is a snap shot of some of the work we are doing & the list of what we could do is endless so we are currently planning on what things will look like post COVID-19 (we know the end will come & we feel we will see the light at the end of the tunnel soon!). I know I am looking forward to further adapting & improving our service in line with the PCNs, DES & other system asks to support safer medication processes in our area & also in support my team to grow, develop & improve. I am very proud how my team is doing & look forward to sharing some thoughts on future progress & priorities soon. Hope you are all feeling valued out there & working within your confidence & competence to showcase what we can do in primary care. Check out the MORPH training events coming up soon to help keen up to date with national guidance & keep up your knoweldge & competencies in line with your role & ambitions.