The winner of the Pharmacy Team Learning and Development Award was Paul Scott-Harris of the Buxted Pharmacy, Buxted, East Sussex.

The pharmacy is fully integrated within the Buxted Medical Centre and is owned by the GP practice based there. Mr Scott-Harris attends clinical meetings to provide pharmacy input and the pharmacy has read/write access to patients’ clinical records. The pharmacy supports the dispensing doctor aspect of the surgery by training practice staff.

The pharmacy business has been built up from scratch over two years, from two members of staff to seven today. These are one accredited checking technician, one dispenser, one pre-registration student, two medicines counter assistants and two drivers, plus pharmacist manager Mr Scott-Harris.

All team members have undergone medicines counter assistant training to improve their skills in dealing with patients. Everyone’s results for NVQ2 and 3 and delivery drivers have been above 90 per cent. And the pharmacy’s pre-registration student gained a distinction.

An ACT has been supported in her induction and pre- registration students sit in on GP appointments on occasion to see how GPs deal with patients.

All team members lead on a specific lifestyle service, increasing service availability, team engagement and ownership. “Weekly huddles” are used to discuss good and bad points from the previous week, and recognise successes as well as identifying learning opportunities. A training matrix is used to chart all team members’ progress and development.

Staff routinely provide an average of six blood pressure measurements for the surgery every day, directly uploading these results onto the surgery patient record. And counter staff use a COPD6 machine to aid diagnosis and screen patients for COPD while they’re waiting for their prescriptions.

The pharmacy was integral to a recent dementia “golden ticket” pilot, which formed part of the case to deliver a dementia care pathway with the CCG, into which community pharmacy is integrated. All pharmacy staff are dementia friends.

Mr Scott-Harris has completed a dementia fellowship with the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and leads on dementia care through the CCG at the surgery. He is undertaking an independent prescriber course and was a regional finalist in this year’s RPS Love your Pharmacist awards.

Clara Carter (sales director, Actavis) said that her company was pleased to be sponsoring the award. Learning and development was key for working in the changing environment. What particularly struck her with this award was the joint working between the GPs and the pharmacy. 

Mr Scott-Harris said that the award was not necessarily about him but about his team. All he did was to provide the platform for his team to work in. A team needed a leader but the leader needed a team to develop the goals. Currently, the pharmacy was seeing 25 per cent growth per year, and that included OTC growth as well.

For the future, he wanted to develop the team further. He said that pharmacists should avoid dispensing tasks, empowering others to do that, and spend more time with patients.