Empowering our pharmacy professionals via our updated Care Card 

A message from Claire Nevinson, Superintendent Pharmacist

In February, I set out our decision to relaunch The Boots Healthcare Way and highlighted the accompanying training to support your team in using this framework for the provision of compassionate, person-centred care when giving advice on the appropriate use of over-the-counter (OTC) medicines. As you know, the Boots Healthcare Way enables our pharmacy team members to help support medicines adherence, promote positive health outcomes and build relationships with patients and customers. This month I am pleased to launch our updated Care Card, for use alongside The Boots Healthcare Way, to ensure that our patients and customers are always given high quality advice in a timely manner.

This refresh of the Care Card has been designed with the future of community pharmacy practice in mind. It aligns with our new tailored Pharmacy Technician Development Programme, which aims to enhance existing knowledge of common clinical conditions, develop leadership skills and behaviours and give Boots Macmillan Information training to create Boots Macmillan Information Pharmacy Technicians (BMITs). I fully recognise that there are professional tasks and situations for which a pharmacist’s training and skills are specifically required. To enable our pharmacists to focus on these, it is imperative that we make the best use of our pharmacy technicians’ knowledge, skills and experience. In the revised Care Card, you’ll see that there are referral pathways and product-related queries that can be triaged ‘in the moment’ by a pharmacy technician (always working within their scope of competence) so that customers can be looked after in a timely manner. 

I recognise that enabling pharmacists to focus more closely on those aspects of practice that only their role can deliver and empowering our pharmacy technicians to further meet evolving patient and customer needs requires a change in behaviour. I cannot overstate the importance of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians working together to agree (and then share with the whole healthcare team) what issues will require direct referral to the pharmacist and any associated safety-netting needed to protect customers. Our decision to proactively upskill our pharmacy technicians will empower our healthcare teams to be ready, and able to adapt as needed, to a more service-led and patient-facing future in community pharmacy practice that is both exciting and professionally fulfilling. Pharmacy Technician Day takes place on Tuesday 15 October. Please take the opportunity to recognise and celebrate the brilliant pharmacy technicians with whom you work. Share your appreciation, or your story, on Viva Engage by using #PharmacyTechnicianDay24 #PTD24.