Background: Healthcare systems globally are expanding community pharmacy services to meet patient needs and reduce healthcare costs. In England this includes helping community pharmacies to provide integrated professional services but concerns persist over quality of care. This study aimed to identify priorities from key stakeholders for improving the quality of professional community pharmacy services.
Methods: Six homogenous nominal group (NG) discussions (face-to-face and online) involved 36 participants from diverse stakeholder backgrounds. Participants included patients (n = 10), community pharmacists (n = 7), general practitioners, a general practice-based pharmacist (n = 4), community pharmacy service regulators (n = 5), Community Pharmacy England members (n = 4), and Local Pharmaceutical Committee members (n = 6), both responsible for negotiating services. Delbecq's NG technique included silent idea generation, round-robin feedback, discussion, and ranking for consensus building. Discussions were audio-recorded and verbatim transcripts analysed thematically using NVivo12. Emerging themes across all NGDs were analysed by thematic analyses. Individual discrete ranking within each NGD were then combined by summing the mean scores of the categories within each theme.
Results: Five key themes emerged from qualitative analysis across all NGDs: quality service design, sustained funding, integration with the wider healthcare system, positioning community pharmacy as a hub for patient needs, and adequate workforce training, optimising staffing and retention. Participants emphasised the need for long-term commitment to quality service design centred on addressing local patient need, sustained and predictable funding. Community pharmacy staff having some access to patient records for making informed clinical decisions was discussed. Scoring priorities ranked as follows (highest to lowest): ensuring quality service design, sustained funding, integration with healthcare systems, community pharmacy as patient hubs, and workforce training and retention, reflecting different stakeholder priorities in these areas.
Conclusion: This study highlighted core priority areas for a framework to improve the quality of community pharmacy professional services within a more responsive and integrated primary care led healthcare system.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-11869-1 | DOI Listing |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11653696 | PMC |
BMC Med
December 2024
Department of Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology, Faculty of Epidemiology & Population Health, London, School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK.
Background: Direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) have been reported to be associated with a higher risk of mortality compared with an older alternative, warfarin using primary care data in the United Kingdom (UK). However, other studies observed contradictory findings. We therefore aimed to investigate the association between mortality and warfarin, compared with DOACs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Pharm Bull
December 2024
Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences.
With the increase in life expectancy in Japan, the proportion of older adults requiring medical assistance continues to increase. Hence, the Japanese government proposed the establishment of a community-based integrated care system, aimed at ensuring housing, medical care, long-term care, prevention, and lifestyle support in a comprehensive manner by 2025. To achieve this paradigm shift, pharmacies must collaborate with their respective medical providers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur J Med Genet
December 2024
Department of Clinical Genetics, Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Children's' Health Ireland, Dublin, Republic of Ireland; Academic Centre on Rare Diseases, University College Dublin, Dublin, Republic of Ireland; National Centre for Inherited Metabolic Disorders, Children's Health Ireland, Temple Street Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Electronic address:
Background: The Roma population are an endogamous, genetically isolated, minority population who migrated from North-Western India to Europe from the 10 Century throughout the Byzantine period and continues to the present day. Approximately 10-12 million Romani people reside in segregated settlements in Europe, and smaller populations live in North America and China. In addition to the endogamy, they also practice consanguinity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Diarrhoeal diseases claim more than 1 million lives annually and are a leading cause of death in children younger than 5 years. Comprehensive global estimates of the diarrhoeal disease burden for specific age groups of children younger than 5 years are scarce, and the burden in children older than 5 years and in adults is also understudied. We used results from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2021 to assess the burden of, and trends in, diarrhoeal diseases overall and attributable to 13 pathogens, as well as the contributions of associated risk factors, in children and adults in 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2021.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizophr Res
December 2024
Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; ICES (formerly Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences), Toronto, ON, Canada; Institute of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Women's College Hospital and Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada. Electronic address:
Background And Hypothesis: While maternal schizophrenia is linked to chronic childhood medical conditions, little is known about the risk of acute asthma exacerbations among children whose mothers have schizophrenia. This population-based study used health data for all of Ontario, Canada to evaluate whether having a mother with schizophrenia was associated with increased risk of asthma exacerbations.
Study Design: The study cohort included 385,989 children diagnosed with asthma from age 2 years onward, followed from the time of their asthma diagnosis up to a maximum of age 19 years.
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