Healthcare provision

Assessing the integration of pharmacist independent prescribers in child and adolescent mental health services

The outcomes of integrating two pharmacist independent prescribers into a community child and adolescent mental health services and the acceptance of their role as part of the multidisciplinary team.…

Nearly half of Pharmacy Integration Fund for 2019–2020 spent elsewhere in NHS

Exclusive: Of the £40m budgeted for the Pharmacy Integration Fund, just £20.9m was used for projects within the fund.…

Collaboration not competition: the NHS masterplan to keep patients out of hospital

Health challenges and inequalities have been exacerbated by COVID-19, meaning providing joined up health and social care that keeps people out of hospital is more important than ever, and is central to the government’s blueprint for the NHS in England. Pharmacy teams are already playing an integra…

Reaching for the cloud: the case for a universal digital patient record

Pharmacists have long called for read-write access to the patient record, with patient consent. In this blog, Clare Morrison, director for Scotland at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, makes the case for going one step beyond: holding patient records in a single, universal data cloud.…

Antidepressant prescribing up 6% in last three months of 2020

Despite a rise in antidepressant prescriptions, the overall rate of increase has slowed, the NHS Business Services Authority has found.…

Families are struggling to use medicines at home — we must truly involve them in their own safety

Surprisingly few medicine errors in children in the home setting are reported, yet evidence suggests that parents sometimes struggle here. We can tackle this hidden medicines safety issue by putting families’ insight at the heart of our interventions.…

Pharmacy ‘first ports of call’ are disappearing in struggling communities

A disproportionate number of community pharmacies are closing in the most deprived areas of England, analysis by The Pharmaceutical Journal has found. Without better funding for the sector, the health inequalities exposed by the pandemic could widen even further.…

NHS investigation body launches inquiry into medication errors in children

The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch will explore the risks of medication errors occurring, following an incident involving a child aged four years.…

Some antiepileptic drugs are safer than others for use during pregnancy, MHRA review concludes

Two antiepileptic drugs, lamotrigine and levetiracetam, are safer to take in pregnancy than others, a safety review by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has found.…

Regulators approve Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for use in the UK

The mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna is the third COVID-19 vaccine to be authorised for supply in the UK.…