HPE LIVE interviews

I am looking forward to being able to attend HPE LIVE to meet with colleagues and others working across the NHS supporting the safe and effective use of medicines.

I am sure that the presentation on the national Lord Carter programme and the Hospital Pharmacy & Medicines Optimisation work stream will help update the audience on this nationally important work developing productivity metrics and the concept of a ‘model hospital’ including the core and other elements involved in providing a model hospital pharmacy.

What are you looking forward to most about the event?

I have never been to the HPE LIVE event before, but based on experience of attending conferences such as those organised by the UKCPA, these are great opportunities to network and learn from peers alongside experts in various fields. It’s great to feel motivated to take even a small idea back to your own workplace with confidence that it has worked elsewhere.

Seven day working is obviously high on the political agenda. At our Trust we have seen benefits and faced challenges in implementing a seven day service to the admissions wards. We need to be realistic about what is achievable from limited resource and I hope that others can learn from how we have managed the new service over the last 18 months, making use of the skill mix available from both technicians and pharmacists. Medicines reconciliation is central to my team’s role and I will discuss how this has been particularly important on our elderly care admissions ward.

I believe HPE LIVE is an excellent opportunity to meet and network with my fellow colleagues in secondary care. I am looking forward to getting an overview and update on service delivery within the hospital sector both here in the UK and in Europe. There is a lot of innovation in pharmacy and I am eager to see the latest models of care and services within the hospital setting as well as the ‘out of hospital space’.

The focus of my talk is about the new opportunities for collaboration between primary and secondary care in improving healthcare outcomes for patients. The role of community pharmacy is evolving radically. Community pharmacists have a core contract that provides ‘Advance Services’. These include providing patients with pharmaceutical advice and information with their regular medicines (Medicine Use Reviews)  and certain new medicines (New Medicine Service).

LIPCO Healthcare is a federation of independent pharmacists in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland that acts as a ‘provider organisation’. My talk is about how we are working with secondary care to improve adherence, concordance and patient safety with patients who suffer from Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The benefits of this programme range from preventing unplanned hospital admission to improving medication adherence and enabling medicine optimisation. This allows for implementation of new innovative patient-focused services.

I’m looking forward to hearing about the next steps with the HoPMOp process as I believe that the implications from the overall project will be game-changing for hospital pharmacy.  The panel discussion at the end of the day on balancing financial considerations with patient outcomes should be interesting.  There is no single answer to this dilemma, so it is important to hear the different points of view.

My session will be an overview of measuring and benchmarking clinical pharmacy activities in practice. I will be talking about how we went about comparing clinical pharmacy activities across several hospitals, the similarities and differences we found and the implications of the findings. Anyone who wants to understand and discuss why it is important for us as hospital pharmacists to benchmark our activities, the challenges and benefits, should come to this session.

I am most looking forward for the opportunity to learn about other pharmacy practice initiatives that have been undertaken in other places.  This is coupled with the opportunity to network with colleagues which is becoming increasingly difficult hence another benefit of the conference.

The presentation I am giving covers the role of the pharmacy team in relation to optimising patient care with regards to medicines.  The presentation looks at the importance of identifying the current skill mix necessary to meet patient needs but in a cost-effective way.  It also indicates the importance of enabling technologies in order to improve the efficiency of the pharmacy team.

I am looking forward to having the opportunity of engaging with colleagues from across the profession and discussing new ideas.

1. What can we learn from other high-risk industries that could be adapted and implemented in the health sector in order to improve performance?

2. To hear how it’s possible to develop new roles within the profession. The example that will be given will look at an existing task but approach it differently including providing the opportunity for those involved to gain a new set of competencies.

3. The benefits of multi-professional skill mix to improve both patient safety and efficiency, by combining a protocol driven method that pharmacy technicians have with that of a nursing patient centred clinical approach, in the preparation and administration of medicines on a ward.

I am planning to attend HPE LIVE this year because I am looking forward to another opportunity to interact with pharmacy experts from around Europe, nay the world, to form networks and consider options for addressing the challenging situations we all face at this strategic and exciting time when the clinical role of pharmacy is being progressively recognised and opportunities are opening up for pharmacy to contribute to providing better patient care with shrinking resources, for an ageing population with greater needs and demands.

As the experts in medication safety, pharmacists are uniquely positioned to proffer solutions that safeguard the medication chain, optimise the use of medicines by clinicians and patients, improve the patient’s medication journey, and ensure that avoidable costs from errors, or poor treatment choices, are not added to an already stretched health budget.  The fact that pharmacists are accessible in both the hospital and community settings means that the profession can play this critical clinical role alongside other clinicians, to meet the growing health requirements of the populace, extending access to these services beyond the conventional working week.

The HPE LIVE one-day conference provides a compact and concise programme with a good collection of topical issues, delivered by colleagues at the cutting edge of their specialties, showcasing innovative ways of delivering pharmaceutical care.

I have been impressed by the content of previous events and the lively, informative and interactive ways that the sessions have been delivered, and I expect that the 2015 event will be even better.

I would like to learn from my colleagues and make new friends!