Steve Gray, Sheila Woolfrey
As part of a baseline clinical governance assessment, each pharmacy in Northumberland was asked to record prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) interventions in a one-week period of their choosing between January and March 2002. Twenty-one pharmacies returned a total of 191 intervention forms. Sixty-four documented potential changes to OTC treatments and 81 documented potential changes to prescribed treatments, with 46 relating to prescription clari???½ cation or requests foradvice.Interventions were reviewed by two of theauthors and classi???½ ed according to the type andlevel of impact on patient care.The majority of the prescription interventionsrelated to safety (64%) and most were classi???½ ed aseither signi???½ cant or very signi???½ cant (90%). Fiftypercent of the OTC interventions related to safetyand 45% related to quality of life for the patient.Seventy-seven percent were either signi???½ cant orvery signi???½ cant.The level of contact between pharmacists andgeneral practitioners (GPs) or other prescribers wasassessed and in many cases (49/55, 89%) thereviewers considered that the pharmacist couldhave made changes to treatment without the needto contact the prescriber ???½ rst, as is standard practicein hospital pharmacy. If regulations were changedto permit pharmacists to make amendments toprescriptions, and to accept more responsibilityfor patients’ treatments, much GP and pharmacisttime could be saved.
