New patient-facing website to promote NHS pharmacy clinical services
Community Pharmacy England has launched a new patient-facing website to promote several of the key Advanced services that pharmacy teams provide and to direct patients to pharmacies in England that provide these services.
The website (communitypharmacy.org.uk) provides information about the following three services:
- Pharmacy First Service (clinical pathways);
- Hypertension Case-Finding Service (publicly known as the Blood Pressure Check Service); and
- Pharmacy Contraception Service.
There is a separate page for each of the services, providing patients with information about the individual services and directing them to the NHS website to find a pharmacy that offers the service.
This website can be used by other healthcare providers such as GP practices and by Local Pharmaceutical Committees (LPCs) to provide information on these services and direct patients to pharmacies in England that offer them.
Pharmacy owners do not need to sign up to be listed on the website as patients are directed to the service finders and ‘Find a pharmacy’ tools on the NHS website.
Supporting patient choice
The new website also explains patients’ right to choose to use any pharmacy for prescription dispensing and clinical services, and that they can change their choice at any time.
Why has this website been developed?
The website has been developed in response to requests from pharmacy owners and LPCs, many of whom are concerned that patients are being directed to a range of websites and apps that help them to identify a pharmacy service which may benefit them, but which do not then present the patient with a way of identifying all pharmacies providing a service.
By directing patients to ‘Find a pharmacy’ tools on the NHS website, our new website for patients tries to address some of these challenges, to maximise patient choice.
Promoting the patient-facing website
We have produced the following resources to support pharmacy teams to promote the new patient-facing website:
Template email/letter to GPs practice from pharmacy owners/managers (Word)
The above template email/letter could be sent to GP practices to highlight the new website and ask them to promote this on their website.
Template news article for GP practice newsletters and websites on patient facing website (Word)
Template news article for GP practice newsletters and websites on patient facing website (PDF)
The above template news article could be sent to GP practices to ask them to include it on their website or in their newsletter.
Additional resources for LPCs to use can be viewed on our webpage on the new patient-facing website.
