Pharmacy Innovation 
 
Jackie Lewis, Lewis Pharmacy, Exmouth 

Jackie Lewis and her team won the Innovation Award for their tireless work in meeting the needs of their community and in particular the way they improved support for cancer patients. 

Cancer care has suffered during the pandemic, with operations being put on hold because of the number of beds taken by Covid patients and people with cancer symptoms being reluctant to seek help for fear of getting the virus. 

Jackie has built on local relationships with Cancer Research UK, Macmillan, Devon LPC and the Cancer Alliance to design and deliver a service for pharmacy teams to enable earlier cancer diagnosis. 

She secured a grant from the Health Education Foundation and the National Pharmacy Association to design and evaluate a service for pharmacy staff to encourage referral of customers with red flag cancer symptoms. 

The service is called ‘Not Normal for You?’ and has been successfully delivered from 10 East Devon pharmacies. Her pharmacy collected data from patients via questionnaires and cases of cancer were diagnosed earlier because of the service. 

Pfizer awarded her a grant to develop e-learning materials for pharmacy teams that are now hosted on the British Oncology Pharmacy Association website. 

“The work I've been doing on the cancer e-learning has got me through he pandemic as well. It's been something different to focus on. Cancer diagnoses are being potentially missed during the pandemic,” she said. 

“I'm seeing patients who clearly should be seeing their GPs and we've almost become a minor injury service ourselves. I would really like someone to take this project and run with it. We've kept it off patents and intellectual property rights so that someone could take it up if they wanted to. 

“The e-learning I'm doing is for the whole community pharmacy team and it's going to be free and easily accessible and could help community pharmacies diagnose cancer early.” 

The South West Academic Health and Science Network were instrumental in designing the questionnaire and evaluating the results - 63 per cent of service users given a referral card went on to visit their GP. 

Jackie and her husband run the pharmacy and employ a part-time pharmacist, senior dispensers, pharmacy assistants and delivery drivers. She has three consultation rooms and uses them for NHS and private services but they will be used to deliver Covid vaccines in the weeks ahead. 

“The team has pulled together during the pandemic. It's a family business. We've had a summer university student, we've had a retired pharmacist dispensing and it's been a huge effort. We've set up the vaccination service, we've got connections with GPs, nurses, data enterers, all sorts,” Jackie said. 

“We have to do a minimum of 1,000 vaccines a week, so that is maximising our three consultation rooms and that is brilliant. We will need rota in eight staff for every clinic we run and we're pulling in people from the community for that.” 

She insisted she and her team were “absolutely delighted” to win the award because it had taken “many, many years to get to this stage”.  

The pandemic has been a difficult 11 months, but the pharmacy has pulled through. “We got really tired early on, especially at Easter, and the NHS kept asking us to open on every Bank Holiday and that was really hard. All we needed was a day off! That was probably one of the lowest points but I feel we are much more resilient. It's amazing what the human mind and body gets used to.” 
 
This Award was sponsored by Alliance Healthcare. 
 

HIGHLY COMMENDED 
 
Michael Maguire, Middlesbrough 

When Michael worked as a pharmacist at Marton Pharmacy he helped transform the health and well-being of his community. 

Arguably his biggest achievement in the past year was the launch of the community pharmacist consultation service which he created and implemented in the North East with his colleague Andre Yeung. In its first eight months, over 330,000 patients were referred by NHS 111 to community pharmacies throughout England. 

He also designed, implemented and project-managed the Reducing Antibiotic Prescribing (RAP) project that showed community pharmacy and general practice can work together to address two huge challenges: antimicrobial resistance, and time and capacity in general practice. 

The aim of the project was to reduce the levels of inappropriate antibiotic prescribing, and to safely channel some patients away from the GP to increase their capacity and give patients, including those genuinely needing antibiotics, a more effective pathway and better experience. 

Patients with a chesty cough who phoned the practice for an appointment, and potentially antibiotics, were referred by the receptionist to the pharmacy for a three-minute C-Reactive Protein point-of-care test and a private consultation with the pharmacist. This guided the decision as to whether antibiotics were appropriate. 

Patients were managed by the pharmacy or the pharmacist liaised with the GP to take appropriate action including, if necessary, issuing and dispensing an antibiotic prescription. 

The RAP initiative was rolled out to four primary care networks which were keen to become larger scale test sites. Covid-19 put a stop to the project, but the results have not been lost on commissioners.