Clinical Hub Services
Fatai Popoola and team at Popson Healthcare Service (T/A Oasis Pharmacy) have been working closely with GP Practices and Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) for over 5 years.
We currently provide clinical Hub services for clinical back-office work to GP Practices based in London, Mid-Essex and most recently Bedfordshire. This became even more beneficial with the advert of COVID as GPs / clinicians at the practices had more time to focus on the care of their patients in the practice with more complex conditions.
We are committed to continually improving our clinical skills and integrating with the team at Practices to help improve services currently provided, increasing communication, efficiency, overall improving patients’ experience and safety around medication in Primary care.
Clinical Services provided includes:
- Processing hospital discharge summaries and letters; This would include medication reconciliation, clinical coding where applicable, arranging to follow up blood test or appointment for review with the GP, Practice Nurse or Clinical Pharmacist in the Practice.
- Monitoring of patients on high-risk drugs (methotrexate, azathioprine, warfarin, DOAC, Lithium) to meet the current CQC requirement
- Filing of blood test results and arranging follow up appointment where appropriate
- Responding to medication queries from the clinicians, practice team and patients via telephone.
- Dealing with Prescription requests with queries
- Signing of prescriptions on the workflow
- Responding to acute prescription requests
- Deprescribing of unused and inappropriate items
- Complex polypharmacy reviews
- Quality Outcome Framework (QoF) Health check
- QoF Prevalence improvement
- Reviews / consultation focused on QoF Patient cohort via telephone
- Medication review (High risk patients and LTC Management) via telephone
- Domiciliary medication review
- Care home medication review
- Clinical Audits
- Help with the Local incentive scheme
- Medicines Optimisation
Benefits
The key benefit of the hub service:
- Potential increase in efficiency of the services offered in the practice as a lot of the tasks would be done on time. This in the long run would lessen the stress on the frontline staff, enabling them to focus on the walk-in patients. This can also have cost saving benefits.
- This is a pro-active and Person-centred care approach, improving the patients’ experience for their healthcare needs
- Improve the processes for delivery of care and increase learning by the clinicians in trying to improve the care needs of their patients.
- Better collaborative working between the members of staff at the practice. Good service model in demonstrating integrated working between healthcare professionals – a Multi-disciplinary approach
- Potential reduction in hospital re-admission, reducing the patients’ need to go to the hospital
Case Study
A five doctor surgery identified that a significant amount of time was spent managing prescribing. GPs were often carrying out prescribing related tasks between seeing patients, after surgeries, later in the evening and sometimes even at weekends. Patients also expressed dissatisfaction with the time taken to process prescription requests and access medicines.
Following a scoping meeting to understand the practices aims and objectives a 5 sessions/week service was commissioned. The practice was supported by an experienced prescribing pharmacist. The practice worked with the pharmacist to co-design the service model and fully engaged in supporting the introduction of the service by making the broader changes in the practice workflow/processes.
Over a 6 month period, the service has made a significant impact on addressing the workload challenges faced by the GPs. The practice benefited from having an existing experienced reception and administrative team who were trained to ensure the right person was allocated any tasks or queries. This helped to ensure that the GPs only received tasks, letters or queries that could not be dealt with by the pharmacist. As well as a direct impact on the clinical staff workload, the pharmacist was able to support the administrative team with some of their duties, improving overall practice efficiency. This has had the impact of freeing up 5-6 hours of GP time/day across the practice previously spent on these activities.
For more information please contact us on:
Email: oasispharmacy4@gmail.com
Call: 02032474243