Pharmacy Voice has responded to the Department of Health’s ‘Our NHS care objectives – A draft mandate to the NHS Commissioning Board.’
Rob Darracott, Chief Executive of Pharmacy Voice said:
“The reformed NHS will be judged on its performance in delivering improved outcomes for patients. Community pharmacy already intervenes in every community to improve outcomes and the sector’s strengths need to be harnessed through new commissioning relationships and systems.”
In Pharmacy Voice’s response to the consultation, the following points were made: ·
- The draft NHS Mandate has little detail considering how the Secretary of State for Health will hold the NHSCB to account for direct commissioning. Pharmacy Voice seeks an early meeting with the NHSCB to explore how the NHS Mandate should reflect the accountability of the NHSCB for direct commissioning of pharmaceutical services.
- More details are needed around how the Secretary of State for Health ensures the strategic “fit” of the NHS Mandate in relation to public health and social care, how the NHS Outcomes Framework aligns with the Public Health Outcomes Framework and the Commissioning Outcomes Framework and how commissioning services and their budgets align
- Improvement of health outcomes, as measured by the indicators in the NHS Outcomes Framework, is a key objective within the NHS Mandate. The key quality indicators and baseline data set has not been established for pharmaceutical services, which will make it more difficult for the NHSCB to achieve its objectives in relation to those services it directly commissions from pharmacy.
- Pharmacists work in the “medicines space” as experts on medicines. In “Community Pharmacy: our prospectus for better health” (2012), we said that issues within the medicines space, including wastage, poor adherence and medicines-mismatches occurring across interfaces such as admission to secondary care and discharge back into the community, can and must be improved by system wide service redesign. The safe management of medicines has significant public health and patient safety implications and the regular interface between patients and their community pharmacist represent opportunities to improve medicines use and patient wellbeing. The NHSCB must ensure this aspect of pharmaceutical care is built upon in the transformation to the new health and care system.
