We provided pharmacist support and subject matter expertise on key areas of community pharmacy commissioning.
Challenge
Our medicine optimisation team was engaged by the NHSE Community Pharmacy Commissioning team to provide support in Pharmacy Quality Scheme (PQS) audit analysis for anticoagulants (medicines that help prevent blood clots) and deliver a recommendations report.
The purpose of the audit was to:
- Ensure patients taking anticoagulants understand that these medicines affect blood clotting
- Reduce preventable patient harm
- Embed the actions, recommendations and learning from the 2017-2018 Anticoagulant Safety Audit into clinical practice
- Make recommendations to support safety improvement and re-audit the PQS
- Evaluate patients’ knowledge of their oral anticoagulants
What we did
We used a blended multidisciplinary approach which consisted of:
- Our medicines optimisation team provided pharmacy expertise in the interpretation and evaluation of the PQS data, project management, insights and senior pharmacist oversight
- Our analytics and business intelligence team analysed the PQS data for the anticoagulant and antimicrobial audit
Responses were extracted from the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) centralised database and collated.
Data was cleansed to aid analysis against cleansing criteria. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data split into patient demographics, medicines prescribed, possession of alert card, knowledge and awareness of anticoagulation medicine by measure of frequency, measures of dispersion or variance.
Weekly reviews of progress were scheduled with workstream leads from the NHS SCW and NHSE teams. We undertook a deep-dive analysis of the anticoagulant data and antimicrobial data to assess and explore the findings and possible recommendations.
Activity
Medicines optimisation
Analytics and business intelligence
Analysed the Pharmacy Quality Scheme data for the anticoagulant and antimicrobial audit
Outcome
We submitted a report on the analysis findings against pre-set standards and recommendations for the anticoagulant data. 16 recommendations were identified from the audit analysis. This report has now been published on the NHSE website.
Principles of Medicines optimisation that apply:
Principle 1: Aim to understand the patient’s experience
Principle 2: Evidence-based choice of medicines
Principle 3: Ensure medicines use is as safe as possible
Principle 4: Make medicines optimisation part of routine practice
