Mike Smith puts the world to rights...

One thing from the recent evaluation of the New Medicine Service has really grabbed my attention. According to the report, the pharmacies that recruited most people to the service had a culture of providing services to patients at the core of their business: they showed greater team cohesion and a clear ‘can do’ attitude. This got me wondering how some pharmacies do this better than others.

There’s no doubt that some of the factors affecting delivery of the NMS are outside of a pharmacy team’s control. Staffing and resource issues can be a problem to the small independent, and conflicting business and organisational priorities can be more of an issue for the multiples. Some members of staff find it easier to talk to patients, giving them more chance of identifying the right people. Other pharmacies have closer working relationships with local GPs. I think that success with the NMS boils down to two main things – first, how proactively individual pharmacies adopt the idea, and second, how effectively we can prove that NMS can save the NHS money and enhance patient care.

So far, the regulator has failed to issue guidance on how to achieve an ‘excellent’ rating from an inspection.

I would say that the ‘can-do’ attitude identified by the NMS evaluation team is just the sort of ‘X-factor’ that the regulator is looking for in an excellent pharmacy.

Excellence is not just about printing fancy NMS promotional leaflets, putting staff on a training course or having an online appointment-booking gizmo - worthy though all these things are. Having the NMS X-factor is about pharmacies and their staff who have the goal of improved medicines adherence at the core of everything they do. Every word uttered by a pharmacy team member, every product ordered, received, stocked and put on shelf and every contact with a customer, has medicine adherence at its heart.

I can hear you shouting at your copy of P3 now, saying: “Come on, Mike, that’s just not fair - we’re doing our best, to supply medicines that go in and out of short supply without any rhyme or reason, managing rising dispensing volumes and trying to save the pennies where we can, all at the same time”.

The truth is that there are always things that are ‘easy’, ‘difficult’ and ‘too difficult’ to do. For those with long to-do lists, there are loads of things that simply never get done. But, when the prize of achieving the ‘too difficult’ is to enhance the life quality of our patients, to save the NHS some much-needed money and prove the value of pharmacy in this role, then I’d say that is a priority worth having. These are important goals and we need to find a way to achieve them.

“I would say that the ‘can-do’ attitude identified by the NMS evaluation team is just the sort of ‘X-factor’ that the regulator is looking for in an excellent pharmacy"

Finally, I have to mention the recent issues around EPS 2 and missing scripts. It is completely unacceptable that some of the system suppliers dismiss this as a minor problem – it certainly is not. This is something that I always feared would happen and I do hope that it’s a one-off. Make sure that you use the electronic prescription tracker, http://systems.hscic.gov.uk/eps/library/rxtracker. It’s a useful tool.

_{Mike Smith is chairman of Alliance Healthcare, mike.h.smith@ alliance-healthcare.co.uk.}