Empowering you to meet regulatory and best practice requirements

This month marks the seven-year anniversary of the Patient Safety Champion programme. We would like to thank everyone who has engaged with the programme during this time and for the impact they have had on patient safety development in our pharmacies.

The focus this month is on how ‘Our Just Culture’ helps in consistently promoting patient safety and growing a patient safety culture. Your Patient Safety Champion will share the scenario which features in this month’s Patient Safety Champions’ letter with you and ask you to reflect on the factors that led to the particular response from the pharmacy team member and how, by using the appropriate resources and the right coaching, all pharmacy team members can be supported to engage with the principles of ‘Our Just Culture’.

Please share with your Patient Safety Champion any insights or ideas for SMART-ER actions that you may have to support patient safety in your pharmacy.

Gaining rounded experience of community pharmacy practice, including patient-facing clinical services, is an invaluable part of trainee pharmacists’ foundation training year, supporting learning outcomes.

We strongly encourage trainee pharmacists to observe and support the delivery of pharmacy services appropriately whilst also remaining mindful of any Service Specification and/or legal requirements; some services must only be provided by a pharmacist and cannot be provided to patients or customers by trainees, irrespective of their competence.

An example of this is the New Medicine Service (NMS) in England, where the Service Specification states that the service must be provided by a pharmacist. With the patient’s consent, a trainee pharmacist may sit in on, and even contribute to parts of, the NMS discussion with the patient; this could include telephone consultations using the speakerphone function in the consultation room (provided that the conversation cannot be overheard by others).

Timely access to Emergency Hormonal Contraception (EHC) is important and there are various ways in which it can be obtained, including via locally commissioned services, purchasing from a pharmacy as a Pharmacy medicine or via a prescribing service, such as the patient’s GP or Boots Online Doctor. In every situation, there is a legal and professional responsibility to safeguard those using our services.  

Some individual patient circumstances can be challenging. The Boots Online Doctor team has produced a guidance document to provide in-store pharmacists with information about the prescribing of EHC by the Boots Online Doctor clinicians, the safeguarding process and pathway for patients prescribed EHC by the Boots Online Doctor team and collection of the medicine in store. This document also includes information on how multiple requests for EHC are managed – any such patient requests are reviewed in accordance with the appropriate guidelines (which are referenced within the guidance document). 

The Boots Online Doctor guidance document can be accessed here.

Undertaking ‘clinical checks’ of prescriptions ensures that the medication prescribed is appropriate for the patient. It is imperative that a pharmacist is aware of ALL relevant information, including drug interactions, ‘drug doubling’ and any medication that is identified as newly prescribed by the Columbus system – this information enables them to make an informed decision on whether each prescribed item is clinically appropriate. Each time data entry is performed, the ePIF and any extra information must be printed and included with the patient’s prescription(s).

For guidance on what information should be added to the ePIF or printed and shared with the pharmacist, please refer to SOP DIS2 (which is available on MyHub). Pharmacists can refer to SOP DIS7 and its supporting guidance along with the prescription clinical checking tool (all of which are available on MyHub).