EU countries are going to be forced to adopt elements of a French pharmaceutical record system. Sid Dajani, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s elected representative on the Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union, explains

A major challenge for community pharmacists across Europe remains the delivery of effective, patient-centred and efficient services in collaboration with other healthcare professionals. This means that it is becoming increasingly important to support professional interchange with all parties involved in the care of the patient in both secondary and primary care.

To bridge this gap, a pharmaceutical record system (Dossier Pharmaceutique, or DP) has been available in French hospital pharmacies since October 2012. The DP was set up by the French Chamber of Pharmacists in 2007 and now connects 97 per cent of French community pharmacies. In its most basic form this will become mandatory across the EU, and it will be up to each member state to decide the context and level of shared access that it wants. The question is not if this will happen, but when.

The DP was created on a voluntary basis with patient consent, and encompasses all medicines (POM and OTCs) dispensed from any French community pharmacy in the previous four months. From now on, hospital pharmacies will be connected to the system. The aim of extending the DP to the hospital setting is to avoid medicines interactions and redundancies in treatment, while supporting coordination, quality and continuity of treatments, as well as dispensation safety.

During a pilot study undertaken in a hospital in Lunéville (NE France), 217 medication discrepancy cases were detected over 10 months. The shared DP would have allowed pharmacists to detect 78.3 per cent of these medication discrepancies (63.1 per cent were treatments stopped unintentionally, 3.7 per cent were treatments added unintentionally and 11.5 per cent were dosage mistakes).

In the four months since the decree was implemented, 27 per cent of French hospital pharmacies have applied to be connected to the DP system. Following this best practice example, a joint statement by Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union (PGEU) and the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP) was signed in November 2012.

All this highlights the need for multi-professional approaches to healthcare delivery in order to ensure integrated and seamless patient care. It includes a call for improving systems of communication between health sectors when a patient transfers between hospital and community (and vice versa), especially in relation to situations where changes are made to a patient’s medication. PGEU and EAHP are calling for commitment from governments to achieving multiprofessional care, and for the integration of the multiprofessional team concept within health professional education curricula.