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New Medicine Service
Our future depends on it
The Department of Health’s decision to invest in the roll-out of a national New Medicine Service(NMS) is in every sense a vote of confidence in pharmacy. The NMS is being launched on October 1st, a week before the Pharmacy Show to which a number of education sessions are being devoted. However, it is also a throwing down of the gauntlet. The decision represents a clear acknowledgement that in challenging financial times, investment in pharmacy can deliver sustained and significant savings; the onus now rests with pharmacy to prove this once and for all.
Every community pharmacist has first-hand knowledge of the problem that non-adherence to prescribed medicines presents to patients and the NHS; hundreds of thousands of patients in this country are prescribed expensive medicines, and are then left to their own devices to manage their care. A huge proportion of these medicines go on to be wasted or ineffectively used. There is a cost to the NHS from medicines not used by patients, but this is dwarfed by the human cost to patients of sub-optimal treatment of their long-term condition and the long-term cost to the NHS of treating patients with more advanced diseases.
The New Medicine Service, backed by good researchbased evidence, will help reduce this economic and human cost by supporting patients’ right from the start of a course of medicinal therapy – helping to build their understanding, improve their knowledge, and increase their confidence. It fits perfectly with the recent NHS White Paper’s principle of ‘no decision about me without me’; bringing patients into the decision making process and making them partners in their own care. The NMS and better targeted MUR are pharmacy’s unique opportunity to prove that pharmacists can improve adherence and patient outcomes. If we fail – either because we demonstrate from low uptake that we are not interested in the role, or because the interventions do not have a beneficial impact or are not valued, then the outlook is not good, and the service is unlikely to be extended beyond 2013.
The pressure on NHS resources will be there for the long term, and all significant areas of spend will come under critical scrutiny. The cost of medication, including the associated cost of dispensing is the largest single budget spend in primary care. So if we demonstrate that we can improve its efficacy, then we have a compelling case that will help secure community pharmacy’s future. Over the next two years, community pharmacy will be placed in the spotlight - a place of great opportunity. Our future depends on successful implementation of the NMS and targeted MURs.
Alistair Buxton will deliver a session in the Pharmacy Show Patient Services Forum at 3.15pm on Sunday, October 9th entitled “Embracing the New Medicine Service - why all pharmacies must take up the challenge
