Medway Central Primary Care network (PCN) covers five practices in Medway, with a wide variety of demographics. It first became involved in the community pharmacy consultation service (CPCS) nearly two years ago as a way of helping manage demand and making sure they could direct patients to the most appropriate service. It is now one of the most successful referrers into community pharmacy, locally and nationally.
The community pharmacy consultation process (CPCS) allows general practices to direct patients who contact the practice straight to local pharmacies (if they are suitable to be treated in community pharmacy).
When the Maritime Partnership merged with other local practices their patient numbers grew by 50%, but demand increased by even more due to the health inequalities experienced by patients in the new areas. They recognised that the CPCS service may help them manage some of that demand and make sure patients were seeing the right service for their needs, safely.
When the PCN started using the service they found that more patients than expected were being sent back to the GP after their pharmacy referral. They started to undertake a piece of collaborative work with local pharmacies to understand what the reasons for the return to GP service were. They wanted to make sure that the referrals were appropriate and the CPCS was able to handle the amount of referrals sent.
Kayleigh McCutcheon, Practice Manager at Medway Maritime Partnership said; “We started by having conversations with our local pharmacists. Initially we built relationships with the smaller ones, discussing what capacity they had available in their already very busy days. We had conversations with them to understand what they needed from us in terms of triage and whether they had the space and the staff on the ground to fulfil the the referral.
“We then worked with our Clinical Leads, Dr Chris Olukanni and Dr Protichi Mallik to incorporate CPCS into our triage tool. This supports all of our Care Navigators in making sure patients are signposted to the most appropriate service for them and their needs and that the patients are happy with the outcome. We have a care navigation hub of 10 to15 people who answer all of our calls. They use the triage tool during every contact, from the moment a patient requests assistance with their current symptoms. We have worked hard during on-boarding and recognised that we need to train our team not only to understand what was relevant to CPCS and what shouldn’t be referred, but also how to make sure patients felt they qualified for this level of care and that they were not being given a lesser service by being referred to a pharmacy colleague.
We speak to the patients very positively about CPCS, confirming that the patient qualifies to be referred to CPCS but also, critically, confirming that if the pharmacist thinks they still need to be seen by a clinician at the surgery that the pharmacist has a direct line of communication back to the practice and they won’t be disadvantaged or ‘lose their place in the queue’. We also give the patient the pharmacy telephone number so if they haven’t heard within a two hour window they can make direct contact for follow up.
CPCS is routine to us now- it’s part of our core training for all care navigators and our patients are well served by the Pharmacy teams.”
The practice now get minimal referrals back to the practice from approximately 80 referrals per week.
To find out more about the CPCS contact kmicb.gptransformation@nhs.net.