How can we improve the health and wellbeing of our diverse local communities?

That’s the question we’re keen to answer through our work on the national Inclusive Pharmacy Practice (IPP) programme – a group of 15 partner organisations that feel strongly about improving our practice and achieving positive change. Our aim is to make it easier for pharmacy professionals to engage with their local communities more effectively.

Inclusive pharmacy practice is such an important area – it’s about addressing inequalities for people who experience the worst health outcomes. These people include ethnic minority communities, those living with a disability, homeless people, those living in deprived areas, and older people.

And community pharmacists and their teams are uniquely placed to do this well, especially due to the first-hand knowledge you all have of your local communities and greater awareness of their health needs.

 

Engaging professionals and showcasing best practice

 

In addition to the IPP programme, through the national advisory board and its steering we have now launched our ‘national improving practice and engagement group’, which includes senior representatives from the partner organisations.

The purpose of this group is to identify and share examples within their own organisations in reaching out to communities and sharing this content in a twice-yearly newsletter focusing on key inclusive pharmacy practice topics. This aims to support pharmacy professionals working in all settings. The national advisory board has chosen cardiovascular disease (CVD) as the first topic to cover and will be the theme of the first newsletter.

CVD is strongly associated with health inequalities – people living in England’s most deprived areas are almost four times more likely to die prematurely from the condition as those in the least deprived areas. It’s also more likely to affect a person who is male, older, has a severe mental illness, or who is of South Asian or African Caribbean ethnicity. This work reflects the aims of Core20PLUS5, a national NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE&I) approach to support the reduction of health inequalities. It identifies five clinical areas to focus on, including chronic respiratory disease and hypertension case-finding.

 

Day Lewis and Green Light to showcase examples in webinar

 

To help further support the work of community pharmacists and their teams in providing a more tailored service within their local community, NHSE&I is hosting a webinar in partnership with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Association of Pharmacy Technicians UK on Thursday, May 19.

The event will share best practice in population health management and how it can reduce health inequalities, looking at useful tools such as Fingertips to support the management of local population health needs. It will also showcase some excellent case studies from community pharmacy from Day Lewis and Green Light Pharmacy.

This is the one of a series of webinars exploring issues around inclusive pharmacy practice. We know community pharmacy professionals have a wealth of experience in this area that they can share, and we want to provide a platform for doing that. We want to hear your ideas about what works well and encourage you to get involved in our plans to showcase and promote learning.

Ideally, we would want all our community pharmacists and their teams to be able to regularly access and utilise with ease the appropriate tools and resources around population health, and to adopt a culture of more inclusive practice that can together help reduce health inequalities meaningfully and effectively within their local communities.

Community pharmacy is doing already doing some amazing work in this area, but the first webinar on May 19 will provide resources that could help make that work even better.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Register for the population health management webinar here.

Stay up to date with this work and look out for ways to get involved by following me on Twitter: @drmahendrapatel

 

Professor Mahendra Patel is professional advisor to England’s chief pharmaceutical officer and co-chair of the national improving practice and engagement board