GPs and pharmacists involved in the Sheffield Primary Care Pharmacy Programme had the following comments about their joint working:

GPs

“Fantastic resource, supports primary care, frees up the GP to do what only a GP can do.”  

“For community pharmacists to understand the way practices work in relation to medication processes, hospital communication and prescribing in order to work closer together to make the patient journey smoother.”

“It will be good to have better communication with a local community pharmacist.  I hope that the pharmacist will be able to help reduce our workload of reviewing TTOs [‘to take out’ medication] for recently discharged patients.  I am unsure how successful it will be getting the pharmacist to see patients at the surgery for medication reviews.  I am concerned that the patients will not fully understand the role of the community pharmacist within the practice.”

Pharmacists

“I am hoping to be able to provide a better service for my customers, to improve their experience of healthcare by making it more ‘joined-up’ and being able to resolve issues more easily.”

“To understand more about how the surgery works, to establish a better relationship with the surgery, to offer more clinical help to patients, the majority of whom are our customers, to gain more clinical knowledge and apply it, to improve/change my career.”

“Mostly good and mainly the GPs give me problems to sort out. The reception staff are very helpful, which is just as well as there has been next to no induction programme, so the staff have explained how to use the system. There is one GP who seems to resist the solutions and ideas I come up with and likes to keep things ticking over the same as always – I’m working on that!”