England’s Department of Health plans to review hospital pharmacy and medicines optimisation services as part of a wider examination of how to cut waste in NHS procurement.
Pharmacy services to be reviewed
The project will review the hospital’s drug expenditure, medicine usage, patient outcomes and will include benchmarking of all aspects of pharmacy services. The results will be used to compare and evaluate the scope of pharmacy services.
The aim of the project is to identify new ways of delivering services while driving better use of medicines as it incorporates the shift to seven day services.
The project has been described as ‘far reaching’, by Allan Karr, phamracy business services manager at UCL Hospitals Trust.
‘Hospital pharmacies are already performing well in terms of medicines procurement; we have some well tried and tested strategic systems in place. Pharmacists have been looking at efficiencies for years,’ he says.
This project will highlight those well performing trusts, how they have saved money and the resources that are required to do that, and will enable trusts with limited resources to develop a strategy for improving performance.’
The project’s final timetable has yet to be decided but it is expected to run until at least 2016.’