Health Professionals
As part of ‘Delivery for Health’ The Right Medicine, the Scottish Executive's eHealth strategy for pharmaceutical care in Scotland has given direction for these new services. Practitioner Services, part of NHS National Services Scotland (NSS), have played an integral role in developing these services with the resultant roll out in 2006 of the Minor Ailment Service, the first service to be implemented from the ePharmacy Programme.
When fully functional, the ePharmacy Programme will deliver the underpinning technical support for the:
Minor Ailment Service (MAS)
Management of minor ailments on the NHS by community pharmacists.
MAS Frequently Asked Questions are available to view from the Community Pharmacy Website.
Acute Medication Service (AMS)
Provision of pharmaceutical care services for acute prescriptions.
AMS Frequently Asked Questions are available to view from the Community Pharmacy Website.
Chronic Medication Service (CMS)
Provision of pharmaceutical care services for patients with chronic diseases.
CMS Frequently Asked Questions are available to view from the Community Pharmacy Website.
In addition to MAS, AMS and CMS, the Public Health Service (PHS) will support the pharmacists’ role in health improvement and medicine safety as part of the new Pharmacy contract.
The Minor Ailment Service will allow patients who are registered for the service to go straight to their community pharmacist for advice on common conditions that they can self treat. Where appropriate the pharmacist can supply the medicine directly, thus eliminating the need for a GP appointment.
For those patients with ongoing conditions, the community pharmacist can play a more active role in the management of their care on the basis
of one electronic authorisation from the patient’s GP, whose input will be on a six or twelve month basis, rather than the current practice of multiple visits.
Both these examples save time to the patient, the GP and the pharmacist.
The ePharmacy message store is at the heart of the technical infrastructure that has been developed. The message store will control the encrypted messages between GP systems, community pharmacy systems and NSS.
NSS own this service and through Practitioner Services will support it along with the ePharmacy developed national registration and payment systems. These developments ensure that solutions take into account ‘real world’ clinical processes and working practices and have been the result of close collaboration between the Scottish Executive, NSS, Practitioner Services, IT suppliers, GPs and pharmacists.
The ePharmacy programme has many valuable lessons for the NHS in Scotland, as well as other parts of the UK in managing the benefits of a considered approach to change management systems integration, real delivery of a step change to support a national initiative and the reuse rather than replacement of existing systems.
The Community Pharmacy web site is the central point for all information for the rollout of the new Pharmacy contract.
If you're looking for information about pharmacists and the NHS services they provide, visit the Public section of this web site.