EXCLUSIVE

Contractors have called for the Scottish government to use a £5 million fund for the care of discharged patients to improve communication between primary and secondary care.

The fund was designed to "improve the journey of patients through hospital and back home", said Scottish health secretary Alex Neil when he announced it last month. Mr Neil had written to local authorities and NHS health boards to encourage them to use the funding to deal with the "growing number" of patients whose discharge from hospital was being delayed, the Scottish government said last week (August 26).

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) said it was up to each authority to decide how to spend the fund. Contractors told C+D on Tuesday (September 2) that the money should be used to improve the transfer of information about discharged patients from hospitals to community pharmacies. 

Fiona McElrea, owner of Whithorn Pharmacy in Wigtownshire, said "a lot" of the fund should be spent on improving the "communication breakdown" with hospitals.

"We've had problems with discharges for years and it has never got any better. Patient records and discharge summaries are hard to get hold of," she told C+D. 

Neeraj Salwan, owner and superintendent of the Reach Pharmacy Group, told C+D that access to patient records would "really help" pharmacists. Trying to find out about a discharged patient's medical history could "eat up a lot of time" and it was "frustrating to get half the picture", Mr Salwan said.

Contractor George Romanes of Romanes Pharmacy in Duns said delays in discharging patients were a result of "uncertainty" about how they would be cared for at home and pharmacists needed a "unified" approach to assessing these people.

Karen Braithwaite, owner of Aberlour Pharmacy in Moray, said it would be "beneficial" to use the money to ensure hospitals liaised with a community pharmacy when a patient was first admitted.  

Colette Kerr, lead pharmacist at NHS Ayrshire and Arran, said although the health board was not using any of the £5m funding, it was looking at how it could use separate government funding to support community pharmacists to care for people with multiple conditions.

Who's in charge?

NHS Lothian told C+D it was up to the Scottish government and Community Pharmacy Scotland (CPS) to comment on the funding.

A Scottish government spokesman told C+D that it was up to each NHS board to decide how to spend the money, but it was "continuing to investigate" how community pharmacists could be more effectively involved in supporting patients after they are discharged from hospital.

CPS said pharmacists had a "vital role" to play in reducing the delayed discharge of patients from hospital, but it could not comment on how the funding should be spent. 

	How would better communication with hospitals help you improve patient care?