Pharmacy owners: please ask your patients to give feedback on Pharmacy First
Community Pharmacy England and Healthwatch England have launched an online Pharmacy First patient survey that pharmacy owners can direct patients to after receiving the service.
The aim of this collaboration is to collect patient feedback on the service to help inform service improvements and to help to quantify the value of the service to the public.
Pharmacy teams providing Pharmacy First are asked to help promote the survey using the resources we have developed. To encourage as many responses as possible, the survey has been designed to be quick and easy to complete; during testing, most patients took around two minutes to complete it.
Who can use the survey?
We would like all pharmacies providing the Pharmacy First service to help gather valuable public feedback, by asking patients to complete the survey following a consultation for the Minor illness (referrals) or Clinical pathways (referrals and walk-in) strands of the service.
The survey is not for use where patients have used the Urgent supply of medicines / appliances strand of the service.
Why should we ask patients to complete the survey?
Use of the survey is optional, but we encourage pharmacy owners and their teams to consider offering it to patients for several reasons, including:
- Helping to gather important data on patients’ experience of using the service;
- Feeding into the national evaluation of the Pharmacy First service, and the results will be shared with the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England;
- Supporting Community Pharmacy England and Healthwatch England’s national work, and local data can be shared with local Healthwatch organisations and Local Pharmaceutical Committees (LPCs) to inform their discussions on the service at a local level; and
- Reinforcing Community Pharmacy England’s communications and public affairs work to demonstrate the value of the Pharmacy First service.
We will also share a national summary of survey results via our website.
When should I ask patients to complete the survey?
Ask patients if they would be willing to complete the survey at the end of their Pharmacy First consultation (consultations for the Minor illness or Clinical pathways stands of the service).
If the Pharmacy First consultation was for a patient who cannot complete the survey (for example, a young child), the patient’s representative can complete the survey, but the answers should be based on the Pharmacy First consultation that the patient or their representative received from the pharmacy.
The survey will remain open until at least the end of 2025.
Promoting the feedback survey
We have produced the following resources to support pharmacy teams promoting the survey to patients:
- Poster
The poster highlights the survey and includes a short link or QR code for the patient to scan. It could be displayed or kept in the consultation room to show to patients at the end of a Pharmacy First consultation. - Small flyers
These can be handed out to patients if they do not want to complete the survey at the end of the consultation, so they have the details of how to complete the survey later.
The short link to the survey is: bit.ly/PharmacyFirstSurvey
