We have now completed our PCT warfarin audit and are well into the swing of fully complying with the NPSA warfarin guidance. All the staff are trained and we are now speaking to patients who get repeat supplies of warfarin (even those we deliver to).

I’ve found that patients are more than happy to bring their ‘yellow books’, and the senior dispensing staff are also finding it very interesting to look at them and talk to patients. I have even written the SOP!

The two biggest issues locally seem to be patients not being aware they have to carry around their NPSA alert cards at all times, and not being aware of the existence of the 0.5mg tablet.

Well, there is another Easter over and done with. It’s always great fun squeezing a five day working week into four days.

It was particularly mad on the Thursday before Good Friday, when our patients suddenly seemed to wake up to the fact we were going to be closed for the Easter bank holidays.

It also threw our two new staff members in at the deep end, since they had only started working for us the week before. On that particular Thursday, one of them said to me: “I can’t believe it, it’s busier in here today than the supermarket at Christmas.”

We have just received the paperwork for the second PCT multi-disciplinary audit. This one is to find out how well we are adhering to the National Patient Safety Agency guidance on anticoagulants.

I have to say that I take my hat off to the PCT on this one because it has made us push this initiative up to the top of our list of priorities – we were aware of the guidance but never had the time to implement it.

So here we go. The biggest challenge is, of course, viewing the yellow books each time we hand out a repeat script for warfarin. There are lots of training issues here for the senior dispensary staff, not to mention the logistics of how we accomplish this with all our deliveries. I will keep you posted.

A recent case has shown the value of the community pharmacist when a patient is discharged from hospital.

I could see from the discharge information that the patient had been admitted with a GI bleed caused by aspirin, and that his aspirin had been stopped and warfarin had been started. However, both aspirin and warfarin were on the new set of repeat scripts from the GP, so I rang the surgery to tell them and didn’t dispense the aspirin.

The next morning, one of the GPs rang me in a panic to say that he had noticed the error and that the aspirin must be stopped. I told him – to his great relief – that this had already been sorted out.

I know we would all normally double-check aspirin and warfarin being prescribed together, but the fact that the pharmacy always gets sent hospital discharge information is a massive help.

I have just been through another round of interviews for new staff. We have lost one of our counter staff (who got a job just over the road in the local GP surgery) and one of our dispensary staff is about to go on maternity leave.

We advertised for two temporary contracts to last one year. One is to cover the maternity leave and, with the threat of a new pharmacy opening up in one of the GP practices soon, we made the other contract temporary as well.

With the recent closure of Woolies in the town and numerous local factories going under, we weren’t short of candidates.

We have appointed to both positions and both ladies start on Monday. Fingers crossed that we have made the right choices.