9 Top Tips for Pharmacists and Pharmacy Technicians working Remotely


Over the next few weeks, we may have to work remotely in primary care/general practice settings.

Here are some proactive things we can do to help work flows and the medicines side of things moving:

1. Treat each request for double supply of repeat medications individually. Last thing we need is to overload the community pharmacy systems and supplies of critical medicines and create artificial shortages.

2. Utilise ETP at every opportunity and encourage patients to nominate pharmacies if they have not already done so.

3. Given that approximately 80% of all primary care prescribing is for repeat prescriptions, there is a real opportunity to streamline and make maximal use of the systems already in place. Utilise electronic repeat dispensing (eRD). Ensure patient consent is obtained and the patient is on stable chronic medicines. Lots of useful resources are available online.

4. Synchronise medications and quantities so that they can be ordered together and avoid repeat phone calls and visits.

5. In the next month, there will be a whole host of patients that will be reaching their review date for repeat prescriptions and require a medication review. These patients can be found in advance and reviews commenced. This will allow the workload to be proactively managed and hopefully ease pressures on last minute requests, allowing patients to continue ordering over the phone/online.

6. Chronic disease monitoring (CDM) - this is likely to be moved forward (where appropriate) to when ‘business as normal’ resumes. Where CDM is needed to ensure ongoing safety of prescribing, agree with the practice the parameters of safety and duration to work towards e.g. DMARDs and timely blood testing is essential to continue, annual hypertension bloods and CVD risk assessment may be appropriate to delay a few weeks, use your clinical judgement.

7. Medication review and medication requests over the phone - not quite the same as face to face, you miss the verbal cues and building trust & rapport is harder. We are producing an online training piece on this so watch this space..

8. Medications liable to abuse - be vigilant of repeated requests for this group of medications, check the records for previous requests, discuss with colleagues who may know the patient better. Work collaboratively with others in the practice and our community pharmacy colleagues to put safe systems in place.

9. You may need to put a system in place to ensure medicine related workload is directed to the appropriate person, at the appropriate time and where complex patients have the opportunity to be seen/reviewed. Safeguards need to be in place to ensure the continuity of prescribing safety.

Had lots of queries on this over the last few days, I hope that helps.