Are you looking at me?

Paul Rutter

How to perform physical assessments in the pharmacy.

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Reflect

How closely do you examine someone who asks for advice about a medical condition? Do you rely exclusively on what they tell you about their symptoms? Should you give them a more structured physical assessment?

Plan

If you think you should do more in the way of examining patients, this article gives advice on the physical assessment of eye, oral and skin symptoms. Plan how you might incorporate these assessments into your advice on minor ailments.

Act

• Make sure you have a suitable area in your pharmacy for physical assessments.

• If you are using a consultation room, draw up a standard operating procedure on the use of chaperones.

• Read the PSNC Briefing on Chaperone Policy (www.psnc.org.uk). This gives a sample policy and sample patient notification, as well as discussing who might act as chaperones and their training.

• Find out more about physical assessments by reading the publications suggested at the end of the article.

• Look on the British Association of Dermatologists’ website to familiarise yourself with symptoms of common skin ailments (www.bad.org.uk).

• It has been said that the benefit of being a pharmacist is that you can treat patients without touching them. How do you feel about this? Discuss this with colleagues.

Practise on friends and family so you feel confident about conducting physical assessments.

• If you have never done physical assessments before, take a record of the first 10 or so. Did your advice differ from the advice you might have given had you not examined the patient? Did you learn something you might not have learned?

Evaluate

Do you now feel more confident about doing physical assessments in the pharmacy?

Have examinations proved worthwhile, based on the last action point?

Guided reading

Bates’s Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking. Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins. ISBN 0781767180

Assessment Made Incredibly Easy! Springhouse. ISBN 1582553912