Published: 19/02/19

This Circular advises community pharmacy contractors and NHS Boards of initiatives to continue to strengthen and raise the profile of Quality Improvement activity within community pharmacy.

Background

Circular PCA(P)(2016)15, issued in September 2016, introduced Quality Improvement as a key focus of the Community Pharmacy Contract. It is intended that continuous Quality Improvement (QI) will be a feature of the community pharmacy funding settlement going forward.

Circular PCA(P)(2018)8, issued in June 2018, advised that the funding for QI would be paid as a monthly £220 fixed fee, and that further details of activities for 2018/19 would follow.

Detail

The quality improvement activities undertaken using 2017/18 funding were:- completing the Safety Climate Survey and developing an action plan; and participation in Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) Interventions. 5. This circular advises that contractors should ensure that their pharmacy teams continue to implement their action plans and engage with the NSAID intervention activity. It also provides details of a forthcoming workforce survey associated with 2018/19 funding and future training events.

Activities to continue: Non-Steroidal Anti Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) Interventions and Safety Climate Survey action plan implementation

Contractors should continue to ensure that their pharmacy team engages with the activities outlined in Circular PCA(P)(2018)8, using the tools available to support the development of a continuous improvement culture in the community pharmacy network on an ongoing basis.

An introductory RCA pack was developed as a tool to support continuous improvement in the community pharmacy setting. This can be found on the Community Pharmacy Scotland website (www.cps.scot/RCA). Pharmacy teams should ensure they are familiar with these tools to facilitate improvement in response to near misses, dispensing incidents, feedback including complaints and as identified in their Safety Climate Survey action plan. Forthcoming activities also supported by 2018/19 funding: community pharmacy workforce survey and NSAID Safer care bundle training events

A community pharmacy workforce survey was completed in February 2018 with a 98% completion rate across all Boards. NHS Education for Scotland (NES) have agreed with Community Pharmacy Scotland to now co-ordinate this survey on an annual basis to facilitate workforce planning. Collection of data will be undertaken in March 2019, supported by 2018/19 QI monies.

Contractors are required to provide data on their workforce. Community Pharmacist Champions will assist with the collation of data from independent pharmacy contractors. For CCA pharmacies (ASDA, Boots, Lloydspharmacy, Morrison’s, Rowlands, Superdrug and Well pharmacies), this will be completed via your head office.

In May and June 2019, NES will run training events on the NSAID Safer Care bundle, which all community pharmacists are asked to make every effort to attend in person. The aim of these events will be to support community pharmacy practitioners to progress the QI activity in their pharmacy, through introduction of an enhanced NSAID Safer Care bundle, sharing best practice from practitioners who have already implemented this bundle in practice, and supporting teams to improve error reporting and learning from error through good conversations.

NES is delivering a webinar and pharmacists who are unable to attend any of the event dates must ensure that they participate in/ view it. The webinar will be available by end March 2019 and will be recorded.

Future activities

A further circular will be issued to set out the QI activities and associated funding for the 2019/20 financial year – this will include the implementation of the full NSAID Safer Care bundle.