Shifting care safely into people’s own homes and reducing avoidable admissions to hosital is a critical question for the NHS. In Wales, this challenge is being faced head-on with health and social care professionals meeting later this year in Cardiff to consider just how pharmacists and other professionals can make the shift a reality.
Headlined by Professor Don Berwick, President Emeritus of the Inistutue of Health Improvement and Professor Chirs Ham of the King’s Fund, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s (RPS) sixth Wales Medicines Safety Conference will explore the steps needed to safely shift care closer to people’s own’s homes.
The event will bring together a range of professions, NHS managers, policy makers and representatives from the voluntary sector from across Wales and further afiled. It will look at home-grown and international examples of practice where shifts in care are already happening to improve health outcomes and it will consider how change can be embedded in the health care system.
The need for service transformation is becoming ever more clear due to the growing ageing popluation, the increase in long term conditions, and the unsustaibale pressures on hospital services. In Wales alone, the demands on the NHS from chronic conditions has been projected to increase by around 181,000 or 32 per cent between 2010 and 2026. This is a global problem and to tackle this in Wales, the RPS believes it is vital to invest more in the skills and resrouces of pharmacsits to ensure patient medication needs can be addresed and treated as close to their own homes as possible.
Commenting on this year’s conference, Mair Davies, RPS Director for Wales, said, ‘Putting medicines safety at the heart of the health agenda in Wales has been a long standing part of the work of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. This event will continue to highlight the need for greater utilisation of the skills of the pharmacy team in the management of medicines, particular for people with long term conditions.
‘It will highlight where pharmacists can play a greater role in improving health outcomes and reducing the pressures on our GP colleagues. Critically it will help us to call on the Welsh Government to create opportunities for new ways of working where pharmacists can make a greater contribution to the clinical care of patients.’
The conference will also be used as a platform to launch the RPS policy on improving health for people with long-term conditions. This policy is being developed to drive change across Great Britain through harnessing the skills of the pharmacy team as part of multidisciplinary approaches in tackling the challenges facing the NHS due to long-term conditions.
For more information about the conference, visit http://www.rpharms.com/events-calendar/event/2657/6th-rps-wales-medicines-safety-conference/medicines-safety-shifting-care-breaking-the-cycle.
