A PIONEERING pharmacy hub has been created in Newton Stewart – as work to reshape approaches to health and social care continues through the Transforming Wigtownshire programme.
Wigtownshire NHS Pharmacy Team’s Machars Hub is located in Newton Stewart Health Centre, and was officially opened on Wednesday at an event attended by members of the Integration Joint Board, the locality pharmacy team and senior NHS managers.
NHS Project Manager Karen Harper oversaw the creation of the new facility, and said: “Key for me from the hub has been the teamwork from across the board from the pharmacy team themselves to admin and working with estates and IT to pulling it all together.
“The teamwork to get this going has been exemplary and I’m just really proud of the work that everybody has done to bring the hub into fruition.”
Karen is co-ordinating the Transforming Wigtownshire programme which sees health professionals working in partnership with communities to co-design approaches to health and social care from the ground up.
Transforming Wigtownshire’s Independent Chairman John Ross also attended the opening, and said: “We are looking at transforming health and social care throughout Wigtownshire, and this is a good example of how relatively simple procedures can actually produce a much better result which eventually will improve patient experience.”
Explaining how the service works, Prescribing Support Pharmacist Leanne Drummond said: “Previously the pharmacy team had provided a service in to the GP practices one or two days a week and that was the sole pharmacy time that they got.
“Now that we’ve got the pharmacy hubs open in both Stranraer and in Newton Stewart we provide a five day service to the GP practices. It means we’ve increased the support that we can offer them so that we can take more and more work off the GP practices, and it also means that we’ve got our staff all based in one room rather than being in different locations, and it means that we’re all working together and learning from each other.
“It was a huge amount of work to get the pharmacy work up and running and we had huge support from the whole team round about us. We had to resdesign the room around what our requirements were going to be, and probably the biggest addition to this is that is that we’ve now got our own pharmacy consulting room so we can actually do medication reviews from within the pharmacy hub without having to take up space within the GP practices.”
Gordon Loughran is Lead Pharmacist, Community Health and Social Care, and he notes that the hub comes as part of changes resulting from a new national contract for GPs.
Gordon said: “This development that we have here in Newton Stewart, the hub model that we now have for pharmacists working within GP practices – that has come from the change in contractual arrangements that GPs have with the NHS.
“The value of the skill set that the pharmacy team can bring is to providing care for patients to help them manage their medicines better, so that more people are on the right medicine at the right time and taking them more safely, the value of that has really been recognised within that contract.
“So what we now have are pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy support workers and our local community pharmacies much more involved in helping people take their medicines effectively, appropriately, safely, and the value of having such a hub model as we’ve got here in Newton Stewart means that that pharmacy team are all located together right in the middle of the GP practice team so they can work more closely with the doctors and the nurses here.
“It’s a real model potentially for the future, and a really exciting time.”
Dumfries and Galloway Health and Social Care Partnership Chief Officer Julie White attended the official opening on Wednesday.
Cutting the ribbon on the new facility, she said: “The pharmacy hub has been developed as part of our Transforming Wigtownshire programme, alongside our Transforming Primary Care programme through the implementation of the new GP contract.
“I’m delighted to meet the staff here today, ranging from our pharmacists to our technicians to our support workers who will all work as part of our multi-disciplinary team.”
Members of the Integration Joint Board (IJB) have also praised the creation of the new Machars Hub.
IJB Chair Councillor Andy Ferguson said: “I’m really excited. The development here is a tremendous piece of work. It’s been developed down here in Wigtownshire and I would think it’s going to be a model for the rest of the region when all the learning and good practice is made available to be shared with everyone.”
