Historically, in parallel with health authorities, local authorities have been responsible for commissioning the social care needed by their residents, particularly children and vulnerable groups such as older people.
Working with other agencies
Historically, in
parallel with health authorities, local authorities have been responsible for
commissioning the social care needed by their residents, particularly children
and vulnerable groups such as older people. These needs include access to care
homes, domiciliary care, ‘meals on wheels’, fostering services, adoption,
social care assessments and occupational therapy. Successive governments have
encouraged local authorities to outsource these services from the private or
voluntary sector and this has led to an expansion of private home care
agencies.
Nurses are employed
by care homes that provide nursing care. In most other social care environments
social care workers are involved with medi-cation in the course of their
duties. In residential care homes, social care workers administer medication to
their service users unable to manage their own medicines. Domiciliary home care
workers support service users living in their own homes with their medicines in
line with their employer’s policy. Both groups need to access training,
professional advice and medicines infor-mation from pharmacists. While
community pharmacists will provide sup-port to individual service users and
carers, CHS pharmacists often work with social care organisations to support
safe practices with medication, including local policies, training programmes
and advice on documentation.
Education
authorities should work with health professionals such as SN, spe-cialist SN,
community paediatricians and CHS pharmacists to ensure that there are proper
policies for the control and use of medicines both within mainstream and
special schools and in early-years settings. Procedures need to be in place so
that children can access their medicines and medicines are handled and stored
responsibly. All staff involved with medicines need appropriate in-service
train-ing so that they, other staff and parents are clear about their roles.
Many of the
voluntary agencies such as Age UK and the Parkinson’s Disease Society have
concerns around the proper use of medicines by their service users. They may
access help from their local CHS pharmacist to give talks to individual
self-help groups such as stroke clubs or to give advice to agencies in
formulating information leaflets on the use of medicines.
PCCPN is a UK-wide
special-interest group established to provide peer sup-port, networking and
education opportunities to those working in this field. There is an uneven
spread of CHS posts across the UK along with a great variation in the size and
organisation of CHS pharmacy services. Some posts are part-time or sometimes
linked to other duties within hospital pharmacy. There is also a range of
seniority, with chief pharmacists of large CHS pro-viders at band 8c or 8d.
Most CHS posts are band 8a or 8b, reflecting the autonomy and scope of these
posts and the competencies needed. There are also band 7 posts for pharmacists
with less experience of CHS. CHS pharmacy technician posts tend to be graded at
band 5 or 6. A competency framework has been developed for pharmacy staff
working in CHS; this is under review at the time of writing.
Related Topics
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