APPENDIX 38
Memorandum by Gill Booth (PC 54)
I am a registered nurse and am Team Leader of
St. Luke's Hospice at Home in Basildon and Thurrock, South West
Essex. I would urge the committee to look at out of hours drug
provision, as this causes enormous distress to patients, families
and staff. We are trying to provide an out of hours service, backed
up by on-call specialist palliative care consultant medical advice,
which is only benefical if the advice can be followed. I personally
feel that every local general hospital should be a resource to
the community in which it stands. The pharmacy should be available
to them whether they are an inpatient or a community patient.
I feel they should be licensed automatically to accept community
FP 10s and be available, either on-call or on-duty 24/7. The pros
would be:
— a central location—every one
knows where their general hospital is;
— good road access—most patients
have someone who will collect it—if not? a courier service
be devised; and
— the ability to stock sufficient supplies
of all necessary drugs without problems of them becoming out of
date.
This would then stop access to medication being
reliant on the altruistic nature of individual community pharmacists.
It would also stop the hours spent trying to devise legal schemes
to provide medications, and avoid professionals being put at risk
by carrying them. This would have a cost, but I feel it would
be instrumental in keeping patients out of acute beds and at home,
where up to 70% of people would choose to be if asked. The problem
of staffing could be solved by using community pharmacists to
staff it out of hours, with sufficient pay to tempt them, without
the problem of security to their own premises. This may also be
of benefit to other conditions who may be admitted because a certain
medication is required. The first move to obtain necessary medication
is to transfer the patient to casualty, why not have the facility
of the hospital's medication being available to the patient at
home.
The frustration of seeing your patient admitted
from their loving and safe environment to the alien and noisy
atmosphere of an A&E department, purely because you cannot
obtain the drug that you know will help them is very small compared
with the suffering caused to that person. No-one would want their
own mother or father or wife or husband or son or daughter treated
in that way—this is an ideal time to stop this nightmare.
February 2004
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