NHS 70: celebrating pharmacy and looking to the future

Members and organisers of the Pharmacy Collaborative l-r: James Hind, Edward Teggart, Melinda Lyons, Lauren Worrall

by Lauren Worrall and Melinda Lyons

This year, to celebrate 70 years of the NHS, the Local Professional Network for Pharmacy in Greater Manchester held a conference to recognise how pharmacy professionals had contributed to the NHS and looking forward to how pharmacists expect their role to change to serve the needs of the NHS in the future. The conference involved exploring current issues impacting on pharmacy practice. As part of this, the NIHR Greater Manchester PSTRC Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Collaborative gave a workshop in Manchester on their continuing research into improving patient safety.

Co-chaired by Lauren Worrall and Melinda Lyons from the PSTRC, previous translational research was presented demonstrating how some techniques used in high hazard industries could be applied to pharmacy practice.  These included looking at errors, as well as trying to manage distractions and interruptions. There was also insight from the pharmacy collaborative members on how involvement in the research has influenced their practice and provided them with new approaches to improve patient safety in their pharmacy teams.  Collaborative member Edward Teggart presented his approach to managing error risk in practice and James Hind presented his award winning work on managing distractions.

To get the audience of pharmacists really engaged and learn about risk management decision making, the delegates took part in a team game where their risk management decisions could result in them maintaining lucrative service contracts or going bankrupt in the blink of an eye!

The workshop concluded with a question and answer session which led to a lively discussion about safety in practice. The delegates shared the issues that impact upon their work on a day-to-day basis.  In the relatively unexplored area of risk management research in community pharmacy, questions were posed about the potential avenues and future direction of their research. Whilst everyone agreed that patient safety is critical to their practice, there was also agreement that it is often difficult to share good ideas and learning. The concept of the community pharmacy collaborative was something that all agreed enhanced patient safety and could be used in other geographical areas.