Webinar: Advancing Community Pharmacy - Wales (UK)

TRANSCRIPT

Grace Grange, Research Officer, Commonwealth Pharmacists Association

“Hi, I’m Grace Grange. I’m a Research Officer for CPA, and I also work in the Community Pharmacy team on the CwPAMS [Commonwealth Partnerships for Antimicrobial Stewardship] programme, and I’m a community pharmacist by background.”

“The Sore Throat Test and Treat Service is a community pharmacy minor ailment service in Wales. It’s an on-the-spot clinical assessment for group A strep throat infections, and it basically assesses whether an infection is viral or bacterial and whether antibiotics are needed. It forms two parts: it’s a clinical assessment by the pharmacist, and then they can decide whether they need to perform a throat swab test or not to assess whether the infection is viral or bacterial.

“The scheme started back in 2018 – the Welsh Government had recently announced that they were investing an extra £6 million of funding into community pharmacy. The service is available to anyone. Obviously, community pharmacies are based in different communities, being rural, suburban, inner city pharmacies, and it’s kind of just providing that enhanced point of access because we know how difficult it is to access GP appointments. It’s helping patients make sure that they can get timely treatment and access in the right place at the right time, whilst taking the pressure off GP services.

“This is a completely community pharmacist-led minor ailments service; they’re really well placed to be able to deliver the service because they’ve got the clinical skills and also the consultation skills to be able to perform the test and have that conversation with the patient around whether antibiotics are needed or not. The training that you need to provide the Sore Throat Test and Treat Service is a combination of e-learning modules with assessments that cover things like NICE [National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] guidelines on antimicrobial prescribing, also some consultation skills and how to perform the point of care test as well.

“One of the things that’s led to the success of the service is the commitment and buy-in from the Welsh Government and NHS to support community pharmacies. So it’s all about moving care from secondary care into the community and supporting patients to be able to manage conditions without seeing the GP unless it’s necessary.

“The service has been really successful. Data from the initial pilot showed that almost 94% of patients that were seen for the service would have made a GP appointment if it wasn’t available to them. There was really high patient satisfaction with the service, and also 80% of them didn’t receive a supply of antibiotics, showing that the majority of throat infections are viral and antibiotics are not needed, demonstrating the value towards antimicrobial stewardship as well.”