Dublin boosts pharmacists in patients’ management

A new task force set up by the Irish government has recently suggested enhancing the role of pharmacists in healthcare while acknowledging their contribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lack of GPs.

Established last July by Ireland’s Health Minister Stephen Donnelly, the Expert Taskforce looked into the possibilities for pharmacists to be more involved in healthcare.

Following the first recommendation of the Taskforce, the minister for health announced “plans to enable pharmacists to extend the validity of prescriptions from the current maximum period of six months to 12 months, in a move that will improve patient care and access”.

“The Expert Taskforce in Ireland has become the new hot topic in pharmacy, and it’s being led by a good group of people with good intent,” Clare Fitzell, head of strategic policy at the Irish Pharmacy Union told Euractiv.

“We’ve been meeting with the minister for health, initially discussing the need for a pharmacy-focused strategy because at that moment, though we obviously have a Sláintecare strategy in Ireland, it was not necessarily a strategy that recognises the best use of pharmacists’ skill sets,” she added.

Accessible and trusted

Fitzell explained that pharmacists are the healthcare professionals whom patients see most often and, therefore, one of the “most trusted of healthcare professionals because of the level of accessibility”.

“We found the minister was keen to support and work with pharmacy, and actually, everything that happened during the pandemic highlighted the key role we had in terms of public confidence. Right back at the start of the COVID pandemic, pharmacies were one of the healthcare professionals who remained open throughout,” she noted.

COVID legislation relating to pharmacy has not been rescinded for prescription legislation, which is unusual; for example, Fitzell stressed that one of the COVID regulations allowed pharmacists to extend prescriptions, albeit only by an extra three months.

“By European standards, and partly due to COVID, Ireland has good emergency medicines supply regulations that allow pharmacists to use their clinical decision-making to supply medicines in an emergency – that isn’t the same everywhere. We are allowed to dispense emergency supplies of controlled drugs to manage patient care,” she said.

Ageing population

Wider healthcare bottlenecks and changing demographics are influencing part of Ireland’s modernisation of pharmacy.

“We have the same issues that a lot of European countries face in terms of healthcare capacity issues, and especially in our GP (general practitioner) care: because of an ageing population, an increasing population – in Ireland anyway – and a decrease in the healthcare workforce”, Fitzell noted.

Fitzell emphasised that people struggle to get medical appointments with GPs.

“But pharmacy can continue the care in many instances, and the task force is good for pharmacy because it recognises that we have a specific skill set – we can use our medicines expertise and knowledge to share patient care and reduce GP workload.”

“We’re getting back to the fundamental role of pharmacists, which is actually managing patient care and managing medicines correctly,” she said.

[By Brian Maguire – Edited by Vasiliki Angouridi | Euractiv.com]

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