Chemists and nurses to do more to reduce pressure on hospital

Monday 11 January 2016

Your local pharmacist and community nurse could soon be prescribing you what you need to keep you out of hospital.

Health say they are about to start piloting ways to make better use of the Island’s GPs, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy and community nursing services and make the job more appealing for our primary carers.

We might not be facing the same recruitment crisis among health care professionals seen in other places at the moment but the plan behind Health's new primary care strategy is to try and keep our home grown talent in the Island and attract others to come and work here.

Health’s director for system re-design and delivery Rachel Williams said: “I wouldn’t say at the moment we’ve got a recruitment crisis, where we’ve had people retiring we’ve been able to replace them.

“We’ve actually increased the number of GPs in the last five years where other places are having a recruitment issue, but we want to get on the front foot.

“But our hospital is under pressure as it is, we need to ensure we use the hospital for what it needs to do but at the same time support primary care.

“It’s what patients want, they don’t want to be stuck in a hospital bed, they want to be at home with their families and be more in control of their own care."

Ms Williams said many local pharmacists are already qualified to write certain prescriptions and they are now working with Social Security to get them access to actually prescribe them. She hopes to see at least one pharmacist in each of the Island's chemists trained up to do it.

She said: “When you look internationally pharmacists have a really valuable role to play. In other countries they do more than they do here in Jersey and I think that’s how we can address the recruitment challenge.

“There are some young pharmacists that aren’t doing as much of a wider role as they were doing in the UK, it’s not so attractive, there are broader roles where they can do more for patients and our Jersey pharmacists might not come home.

“It might be that they do vaccinations, some pharmacists are qualified to prescribe certain medications, a limited list of medications, where you wouldn’t only have to go to the GP for them.”

“It would help those people who are housebound, who maybe get an infection – if your district nurse is a qualified prescriber it would save you a trip to the GP.”

Speaking about the new strategy, Chair of the Primary Care Body in Jersey, Dr Nigel Minihane, said: “Primary care has been shown to be the most cost effective way of delivering services worldwide and the challenge for Jersey is to make preventive and curative treatment available to all, especially vulnerable members of our society who are currently unable to access it.”