AROUND 430,000 patients across the south east Hampshire area can now get access to expert advice from a clinical pharmacist when they visit their GP.

The move follows a successful pilot site bid for £337,200 to NHS England by the Fareham and Gosport and South Eastern Hampshire Primary Care Alliances, jointly developed with local partners in clinical pharmacy education and non-medical workforce development. 

The funding will run over four years and is to be supplemented by contributions from many of the 40 Alliances GP practices in the South Eastern Hampshire clinical commissioning group areas.

It will enable the recruitment of one senior clinical pharmacist and five clinical pharmacists to work across the areas.

Dr Barbara Rushton, who chairs NHS South Eastern Hampshire Clinical Commissioning Group, welcomed the funding. 

The Liphook GP told The Herald: “This is more fantastic news for patients across our area.

“In order to sustain services to patients, make lasting improvements and expand where we can those services we already have, all our local GP practices are embracing new ways of working.

“We are already some way down the road to a new model of care known as a multi-speciality community provider – or MCP.

“This involves improving our patients’ access to a range of specialist support and extending primary care so that GPs are working alongside colleagues in mental health, social care and community professionals in one single team, supporting people to take control of their own health and wellbeing and promoting self-help measures and doing more to prevent their own ill-health.

“We also hope to be able to provide extended opening hours and longer, more flexible appointments for our patients with an appropriate professional at GP surgeries.

“Now we have this further boost which will involve having access to clinical pharmacists available to patients.

“This will be particularly useful for our frailer, elderly patients as we will be able to give them greater advice, support and expertise – particularly if they are having to take a number of different medicines.

“We want to have more NHS and social care services available in the community rather than in an acute hospital setting as that has to be better for our patients, and this funding is another important step to helping us achieve our vision of providing better local care.”

Recruitment of pharmacists for the initiative started last year, and the first ones started to give some patients the additional support earlier this year.

The pilots will be evaluated and build on the experiences of general practices elsewhere in the country that already have clinical pharmacists as part of their team, in some cases as partners.