Maghull and Hollins Park pharmacies update

Maghull and Hollins Park pharmacies to provide single Trust out of hours pharmacy advisory service

From 1 April the new model will provide advice only out of hours, which is a key change for services that receive their supplies from Maghull, as the pharmacist is not able to visit sites to dispense.  

The new model follows a review of the last eight months of calls to Maghull to identify those that resulted in a pharmacist going on site to dispense and whether calls could have been handled differently. Additional mitigations have been adopted to allow the service to function as a remote service. Please be aware that pharmacists providing the out of hours service do so in addition to working core daily hours.

Mitigations by the Medicines Management Team to support the new model:

1. Ward and emergency drug cupboard stock lists are under constant review and influenced by out of hours requirements.
2. Hollins Park out of hours service has operated without access to a pharmacy for six years.
3. A pharmacy out of hours section containing useful information is available on the Medicines Management YourSpace page
4. Both hospital pharmacies are open every day
5. Weekday opening hours have been extended at the Maghull pharmacy and opening hours for both pharmacies are shown in the table below.

How teams can help themselves:

1. Effective discharge planning - order discharge and leave medication during the normal working week. NB. Maghull pharmacy on call service was never supposed to be used for discharge or short term leave prescriptions.
2. Trigger replacement orders during the week if concerned about running out of needed medication.
3. Encourage patients to bring their medication on admission and/or friends/families to do so after admission, if necessary. As well as improving medicine availability immediately post admission, it helps support accurate understanding of the patient’s medication regime and recent compliance. It also removes potentially unnecessary medication from home if there are changes made during the admission.
4. Consider whether the query is a pharmacy query, for example, IT services should be contacted about EPMA problems, or could the query be deferred to core daytime hours?

Calls to the Trust wide out of hours pharmacy advice service will be reviewed to allow improvements and to support appropriate access of medicines for patient care. Please ensure that all relevant staff are informed of the change to service provision and that the points above are implemented. If you require any further information or have any questions please email: neil.chilton@merseycare.nhs.uk.