Introduction
With a workforce in England including approximately 42,990 registered pharmacists and 19,311 registered pharmacy technicians, community pharmacy teams have considerable potential for promoting the public’s health. Community pharmacies, numbering roughly 11,647, arguably offer an ideal location to reach out to local communities, with qualified teams providing healthy lifestyle advice and services in an accessible and convenient way (Source: Royal Society of Public Health)
With the catastrophic impact that the country has been experiencing since the last 18 months, it is no aberration that Pharmacy services are an important mainstay in the public health domain and have considerable potential to combat the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Furthermore, it is imperative that Pharmacists working in several localities and health facilities are linked to patients either directly or indirectly.
Locum Pharmacists
Locum Pharmacists can act swiftly in public health response such as drafting professional service guidance to pharmacists working in various healthcare facilities, ensuring effective medicine supply system, monitoring and resolving drug shortage issues, establishing and promoting remote pharmacy services, counselling the public on infection prevention basics, educating about proper use of personal protective equipment, discouraging self-medication, participating in clinical trials, small-scale manufacturing of sanitizers and disinfectants, busting the prevailing myths, and conducting drug evaluation and active surveillance.
These interventions will help ease unprecedented burden on healthcare facilities during the ongoing pandemic and eventually will add value to patients and the healthcare system.
The current manuscript accentuates the potential roles and activities that pharmacists can initiate in various healthcare facilities to help in relieving pressure on the overwhelmed healthcare system. The information and suggestions offered by several public health organisations have helped in the restructuring of existing pharmacy services by governments, public health bodies, and policy makers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, these suggestions have underscored any unrealized potential among pharmacists working in various sectors including community, hospital, industry, and drug regulatory authorities.
Role of Community Pharmacists
- Disease Education and Counselling
- Education in hand and Respiratory Hygiene
- Encouraging Social and Physical Distancing
- Provision of Physical Masks and Educating Donning & Doffing Techniques
- Busting the myths and neutralising the misleading narratives.
- Telepharmacy Services
- Active Surveillance of suspicious cases.
- Extemporaneous Preparation for Sanitisers and Disinfectants
- Ensuring appropriate Medicine Inventory
- Effective Medicine supply to patients.
- Medication and Disease Management
- Pharmacovigilance at Community level.
The ensuing challenge & solution
However, challenges remain in ensuring the availability of locum pharmacists with the right skills and at the right time to support the operations of community pharmacies. This stems from a lack of transparency, dependency on third parties and information asymmetry that needs streamlining. Locum pharmacists are constantly in search of opportunities that will allow them to deliver their skills and help support the cause.
We are on a mission to solve these problems and consequently change the dynamics of community pharmacies and how locum pharmacists can support in delivering better healthcare services by donning roles as outlined. With the help of an easy-to-use mobile application – CuRisApp©, we aim to offer these wider range of job roles to locums at their fingertips to bolster community pharmacies with their staff fill rates.
Many pharmacies across the UK are now commissioned to provide a wide range of public health services and advice, including, but not limited to, smoking cessation services, weight management services, NHS Health Checks and COVID vaccinations. We wish to contribute to the
Please continue to read our blog on design thinking methodology that forms the basis for the user-centred design of our CuRisApp© and how we were able to adopt such principles to embark on a rapid development cycle and release an application in 4 months.
If you would like to try our application and share feedback, then feel free to drop us a line at: hello@curisapp.com
