The Chron investigates whether our local pharmacists could be the answer to relieving the pressure on hospitals and GPs
Balmoral Pharmacy in Kingsthorpe, Northampton
FROM GPs offices to the board room at Northampton General Hospital, they are talking about it and, you can be assured, worrying about it.
The issue dominating the NHS in Northampton at the moment is how we have arrived at a full-to-bursting accident and emergency department. And more importantly, what we are going to do about it.
NICK SPOORS takes a look at why pharmacies in Northampton could be the perfect way to help solve the hospital’s problem.
TO most people, the NHS is represented by just two places: the hospital for when you are very badly injured (i.e something has dropped off or you are bleeding buckets), or your GP, when it is something which can wait until next Tuesday.
The fact there are services in between - on the phone, the internet and down the local shops - that could help better and faster, passes most of us by. And the results can be seen in the queues of ambulance trolleys in A&E as other patients ignore all the NHS’s expensive entreaties to choose the right place.
This is frustrating for the health bosses who pay for all these services nobody seems to want to use; but not as frustrating as for the 128 highly-trained pharmacists in Northamptonshire who seem destined to forever be regarded as surprisingly helpful shopkeepers.
In fact, all the staff at your local chemist are trained professionals. And none more so than the pharmacists themselves who have to undergo five years of schooling after their A Levels just to qualify, the same as a doctor.
But there are many more reasons for patients to regard them as the best place to go for all their aches and pains and ailments when they are thinking “I don’t want to bother the doctor”. For one thing, no appointment is necessary, they are a quick service (compared with the target time for dealing with an A&E patient of under four hours), they deal with customers anonymously, offer a room for confidential consultations and even deliver free to your door.
Daljit Poone, who set up the Balmoral Pharmacy, now in Thorpe Road, Kingsthorpe, in 1986, agrees that there are many more advantages to taking your medical problem to your local chemist first.
“I used to have the shop in Balmoral Road and they used to call me Arkwright because I was open all hours,” he laughs.
“But its still almost the same. I’m open from 8.30pm to 7pm, seven days a week and I hardly get a break.
“You have to be always here because no prescription drugs can leave without my say so.”
To see how this all helps the poor emergency doctors and nurses on a Monday morning, you only have to look at an A&E survey released last week that showed only one in three patients there asked their GP before deciding the hospital is the best place to roll up at.
And what is the most commonly given reason, albeit anecdotally, that patients do not go to their GP? Restricted opening hours and difficulty getting appointments.
It is no wonder that NHS bosses failed to see that one coming. After paying for the exact service the public seems to be crying out for, people do not appear to want to use it.
At least part of the problem, the local pharmaceutical board admits, could be branding. As pseudo branches of the NHS, pharmacies are part business, part service.
The National Health Service pays when teenagers get free contraception, as well as for services such as smoking prevention, which makes up the vast majority of a chemist’s income. Yet the famous NHS logo, arguably one of the most powerful brands in Britain and linking GPs, hospitals and community nurses, is rarely given much prominence.
Instead the business part, the sunglasses and baby milk, which is only a fraction of their income (in Balmoral’s case about 10 per cent), is often what the customer sees most, hence the unwanted shopkeeper tag.
Yet underlying that is also the strong feeling of public duty. Aside from dealing with prescriptions at a loss (none of the £7.40 goes to them although they incur a cost for processing them) they are the on-tap go-to men for medication knowledge for everyone from branches of Boots to GPs.
And that is without mentioning the select few who agree to deal with methadone scripts for often challenging drug addicts.
Encouragingly for Daljit and his colleagues there is a concerted county campaign by health bosses to highlight pharmacies as the quick and easy gateway into the NHS that will divert many cases away from A&E.
Rosemary Plum, chief officer of Pharmacy Northamptonshire, said “People are in very safe hands and we want to tell people the advantages of that.
“But there are also the benefits to the NHS as a whole in terms of numbers not going to hospital and not taking on the cost.
“The cost of an A&E consultation is about £52. Pharmacists do that for free. If all the people who should not have gone to A&E in Northamptonshire last year went to a pharmacy, it would have saved £3.4 million. That could be an awful lot of new nurses.”
Pharmacies in Northamptonshire see up to 500 patients a week through the door, and more on the phone, and deal with a startling variety of problems, questions, medical complaints and prescriptions.
That perhaps gives the impression they are too busy for yet more patients, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
“We get paid by the NHS for the number of people we dispense to, “ Daljit says. “So on that basis we could just employ more staff and keep the service the same. Like all pharmacies in the county we can take on more customers.”
It is plain to see that patients reap many benefits from using this particular branch of the NHS as a first port of call and equally clear that pharmacists are actively welcoming more customers.
If the members of the public were to accept this invitation in greater numbers, nobody would be more grateful than Northampton General Hospital’s doctors and nurses in accident and emergency.
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