A hospital pharmacist has urged Liverpool community pharmacies to join an asthma pilot and “remove the stigma” of delivering MURs to children.
 
As part of the year-long pilot, which launched in December, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital said it had provided training materials and inhaler technique lessons to community pharmacy staff, to encourage them to target patients aged 18 and younger.
 
The project was supported by Liverpool clinical commissioning group (CCG) and should “demonstrate the benefits of interventions by community pharmacy”, the hospital said. But only around 25 of 100 pharmacies in the area had signed up so far, specialist paediatric pharmacist Andrew Lilley told C+D on April 16.
 
Mr Lilley said he was disappointed by the lack of engagement from national chains with branches in the area, and claimed that only Lloydspharmacy had "really understood" the pilot's potential. Some pharmacies had told him they were already hitting their annual MUR target and could not be convinced to attend the inhaler technique sessions, Mr Lilley said.
  
“The main issue is trying to persuade people to do extra services without being paid. Certain big multiple chains haven’t wanted to take part because it’s a pilot programme so the funding is non-existent,”.

MUR reluctance

Although MURs can be delivered to children, community pharmacists were often reluctant to do this because they did not want to interfere with any “strange medications” that had been prescribed by a hospital specialist, Mr Lilley said.
 
“They feel like they need more training to do an MUR on a child. But I keep saying to them, ‘it’s the same medicines that you’re giving to an adult – you just have to take the issue of consent into consideration and engage with the child',” he added.
 
Providing MURs and inhaler technique lessons to some children had “turned their asthma right around”, he said. “[The older boys] have gone from not being able to engage to being well enough to be able to play football,” he said.

“Quite a few who were seven or eight were bouncing in and out of hospital having steroids and antibiotics, but during the past two months they’ve had no exacerbations requiring intervention,” he added.

Parents are asked to fill out a standardised asthma control test about their child to measure the success of the scheme. Mr Lilley said patients had shown an average improvement of between eight and nine points out of a total of 25, and he hoped the service would be commissioned permanently.
 
 

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