As volunteers of CB Plus Primary Care Group, we assess patients’ health services & their experiences with the aim of bringing the patients & those running the services to understand each other’s needs better, thus improving those services for the benefit of NHS patients. We hope this will lead to an improved way of working & health benefits.
Through personal conversations & experiences, it was felt that there were several challenges facing patients, pharmacists & GPs in medication management & for that reason, we decided to investigate what those might be by conducting a survey. Our intention for this was to improve primary & secondary medical conditions/outcomes by addressing any medication management problems. It is pertinent that good, effective medication management improves health outcomes & helps to prevent disease progression, keeping the general population healthier, mobile & independent & financially beneficial for the NHS.
Pharmacists & GPs are intertwined in playing a crucial role in the healthcare system in medication management. It was therefore decided to conduct this survey with local pharmacists to see if any problems were preventing high-quality medication treatments.
As medication management is multi-faceted, we decided to draw up a questionnaire for Barnet-based pharmacists, the Centre for Community-based Medication Management, to cover the breadth of real & potential problems that could arise.
From this survey, we found particular issues about:
Frail patients, patients with dementia, inadequate communications between Secondary and Primary Care, inadequate reviewing of hospital-prescribed medication after patients’ discharge to home, poor communication between GPs, Pharmacists & patients both generally and post-discharge from the hospital and also the reviewing of changes & multiplicity of medications & that pharmacists’ workloads have increased exponentially, adversely affecting ease of communications.
From the findings of this survey, those issues deemed most serious or problematic were taken forward with recommendations to persons & groups who could best influence positive changes to rectify the problems found.
Further information on the report of our survey, how we conducted it, and our recommendations can be found here at this link.
