Minor ailments

Transcript

Every year, millions of patients visit their GP with minor health problems that the local pharmacist could resolve. It's estimated 50 million visits to the GP are made every year for minor ailments such as coughs and colds, mild eczema and athlete's foot. Local pharmacies are ideally placed in the community to give advice and suggest treatment options.

Minor ailment services are commissioned locally and there is no national service at present in England. There are a variety of conditions and eligibility criteria that are covered by this service and these can vary from area to area.

On this page you’ll find a variety of resources to help you understand the minor ailments service. There are workshops to attend if you prefer face-to-face learning or a number of e-courses to undertake if you want to learn on the go. You can learn with your team at theLearningPharmacy.com, work on your consultation skills or look up the latest NICE guidelines on this service.

The evolving world of pharmacy practice means that pharmacy professionals are spending more time than ever conducting patient consultations. Good communication skills are vital to ensure both you and the patient get the best from the discussion. This workshop will support you in developing the key consultation skills needed to ensure you are confident in delivering high-quality person-centred consultations.

This full-day workshop has been developed to support pharmacy professionals working in all sectors.

#CPPEconsultationskills

Learning Outcomes:

• outline your professional responsibility to reflect on and develop your consultation skills
• analyse your consultation skills against a validated framework and identify your strengths and areas for development
• apply key skills, models and techniques that support a person-centred approach
• critique consultation skills and behaviours, and provide feedback on areas of good practice and areas for development
• demonstrate an increase in your confidence to deliver high-quality person-centred consultations.

The Consultation skills for pharmacy practice (CSfPP) website has been developed in association with Health Education England to support pharmacy professionals in developing patient-centred consultation practice; it presents a six-step learning and development pathway with useful tools and resources to support personal reflection, learning and assessment.

You can access this website here: Consultation skills for pharmacy practice

Learning Outcomes:

• explain why consultation skills are important for all pharmacy professionals
• recognise your professional responsibility to reflect on and develop your consultation skills, by working towards the new practice standards
• establish how productive your consultation skills are currently and identify key areas on which to build your expertise
• describe and apply the key skills, models and techniques that support a patient-centred approach to your consultation practice
• engage in the CSfPP assessment process to review your learning and development effectively
• explore how you can continue to develop your skills and behaviours in practice.

Excellent communication and consultation skills are a key part of providing safe and effective services. CPPE has developed this set of cards to help all pharmacy staff improve their skills. All members of the pharmacy team should find this resource useful for improving their communication and consultation skills. The cards can be used by individuals, or as a tool to facilitate a training session.

This learning resource is also freely available for all pharmacy staff to download from the Consultation skills for pharmacy practice website.

Learning Outcomes:

• describe what patient-centred care means
• be more confident when communicating with the people who come into your pharmacy
• recognise good communication and consultation skills, compared with those that need improvement
• explain how facial expressions and body language can improve communication and help to build a rapport
• apply good listening skills
• know how to close a consultation effectively and safely
• discuss some of the challenges and barriers to good communication in community pharmacy.

This hub page contains links to tools and publications that LPCs may find useful when trying to spot opportunities for the commissioning and development of new community pharmacy services.

PSNC and Pharmacy Voice have issued the statement and key messages via this link which may be of use to LPCs and pharmacies if this issue comes up locally.

This one-stop resource hub has been compiled to support community pharmacy teams to manage minor illnesses, and identify any red flag symptoms.

This page will bring together all the PrescQIPP self care resources and campaign materials as well as showcase good practice examples of projects in self care and signpost to self care resources.