Introduction

Community health services

Introduction

Understandably, many hospital pharmacy staff are unfamiliar with commu-nity health services (CHS), though access to CHS is essential to keep the population healthy (immunisation programmes), to maintain vulnerable people in their own homes and prevent unnecessary admissions to hospital (‘virtual wards’, community nursing).

Many departments provide services to the community via a contract or service level agreement (SLA) with a local CHS provider; this can include supply, advice and specialist clinical service elements. They may also employ staff who specialise in CHS or the CHS provider organisation may be inte-grated into a hospital or mental health trust.

Since the first edition of this book there has been divergence in the policies of the UK governments and in the organisation of health services in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as discussed in Chapter 1. However, the national health strategies have much in common, including:

·      improving the population’s health and preventing ill health

·      providing patient-centred care as close to the patient as possible

·      moving care outside hospital into community settings.

Examples of this third element are anticoagulant services delivered by general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists with a special interest and musculoskel-etal services delivered by physiotherapists. Each of these developments increases the volume and often the complexity of the care delivered in CHS settings. Alongside this is an increasing emphasis on the quality and safety of services, including optimal use of medicines and better communications across interfaces of care.

This chapter describes CHS and the role of the healthcare professionals who work in CHS. It also describes the support that is provided by pharma-cists and pharmacy technicians specialising in this area of practice.