The Royal Pharmaceutical Society has commissioned and published a strategy entitled ‘A vision for pharmacy professional practice in England’.
The vision is split into people-centred themes and enabling themes. Under people-centre, it lists supporting people and communities to live well for longer; enabling people to live well with the medicines that they take; and enhancing patient experience and access to care. With regards to enabling themes, the vision covers pharmacy people/staff; data, innovation, science and research; and leadership, collaboration and integration.
Here, we will take a look at the digital aspects of the strategy.
Supporting people and communities to live well for longer
The aim in this area is for “patients and carers, the public, health and social care teams and local governments [to] embrace the key role that pharmacy teams play in supporting people and their communities to stay healthy and well.”
With regards to how professional practice should look in ten years’ time, the vision states: “Through their community pharmacies, people have walk in access to health improvement services that meet local needs, such as provision of advice, digital therapies and prescribing of medicines for communicable and non-communicable diseases, women’s health and vaccination programmes.”
Looking to digital inclusion, it adds: “People who fall out of the formal health care system or have no way into health care service, for example, due to digital poverty, or social factors linked to inclusion health groups, are identified and pharmacy teams work with multidisciplinary teams to facilitate access into pathways of care.”
The document goes on to describe how this will happen through pharmacy teams working to reduce the barriers that prevent people from accessing care, which will include giving advice how to use devices and providing support for digital consultations.
In addition, local pharmacy teams should collaborate to provide people with rapid access to health improvement services that meet local needs, with pharmacists working as part of a digitally-connected multidisciplinary team to initiative medicines and monitor treatments.
Enabling people to live well with the medicines that they take
Here, the aim is for person-centred care and shared decision-making to underpin all interactions with patients and the public and for pharmacy teams to take a leadership role in prescribing and medicines optimisation.
The vision highlights that digital-focused staff are already working to support this. “Increasingly people are being supported by pharmacists and pharmacy technicians embedded as part of a multidisciplinary workforce within GP practices. They are liaising with pharmacy colleagues and other clinical staff… their roles vary, but they can include system wide leadership, such as digital safety or medicines safety officer.”
Enhancing patient experience and access to care
The vision shares an aim for people to “receive holistic, person-centred care from pharmacy teams as part of a digitally connected, wider multidisciplinary team” in the hopes of preventing unnecessary repetition for patients with different healthcare professionals. “Pharmacy teams across the system [will] collaborate to provide people with safe, effective and rapid access to the care and the medicines that they need, when they need them,” it adds.
In the future, the document lays out the hope of seeing people access care from pharmacy teams in a way that suits them and highlights how “innovations in patient-facing digital technology, remote monitoring and artificial intelligence” will be “routinely used without creating barriers for people who are unable to use these technologies.”
Data, innovation, science and research
The document highlights how data and information can be used to personalise care, drive service improvements to meet population health needs and improve outcome.
In ten years’ time, it is expected that population-based decisions informed by data will be made at system and local levels to tackle health inequalities, plan services and prioritise pharmacy resources. Improvements will be driven by the availability of real-time clinical and prescribing information through a single EPR and technology will be utilised to empower people in preventing ill health and getting the best from their medicines.
“Pharmacy teams are the recognised systems leaders of the medicines digital health agenda that ensures clinical safety,” the vision states. “This includes digital apps, wearables, diagnostics, and disease and medicine management tools.”
Another expectation is for “pharmacy teams [to] adapt their services to incorporate new healthcare technology, such as artificial intelligence, 3D printing of medicines [and] nanotechnology.”
With regards to new pathways, it is hoped that pharmacy teams will be “clinical and technical leaders of new services and pathways which benefit patient care. They [will] lead on the development and safe introduction into the healthcare system of innovations such as pharmacogenomics, advanced therapy personalised medicines, radioligand therapy and precision medicine.”
In addition, the vision adds that interventions will be evaluated and learning from research implemented rapidly back into improving patient care.
A number of short-term implementation goals are shared in this area. These include the pharmacy workforce having the digital skills to enable them to capitalise on data and digital; to develop the workforce across systems ready for the large-scale roll out of pharmacogenomic testing and personalised prescribing; and to embed a research, quality improvement and clinical audit culture.
Next steps for collaborative work
The document concludes with a note on the changes coming for pharmacy practice and how the sector needs to move to meet it.
“Pharmacy professional practice in ten years will look substantially different to how it looks today,” it states. “From digital skills necessary to capitalise on the data and digital revolution… through to qualifying as a prescriber to support people with complex medicine needs or long-term conditions… the skills pharmacy teams will need are changing and the pharmacy workforce, supported by its leadership, needs to be ready for these future roles.”
To read the document in full, please click here.
