RPS England has called for greater focus on the delivery of Structure Medication Reviews (SMRs) in primary care to ensure that pharmacists can continue to deliver these important medicines optimisation services for patients.

In a new policy statement, RPS warns the focus of the pharmacy workforce in primary care is moving away from the delivery of SMRs in practice, despite evidence of their clinical and economic impact.

Key recommendations of the policy are:

• Primary Care Networks (PCN) must recognise that medicines optimisation and SMRs remain part of the core contract and PCNs are accountable for their delivery
• PCN pharmacy teams should be enabled to prioritise SMR activity in the highest risk patients
• SMR uptake and delivery should be monitored and reviewed regularly at ICS and PCN level
• Efforts should be made to improve the quality and accuracy of the coding and structure of SMRs to support benchmarking and evaluation
• Further patient outcome orientated research should be funded to measure and evaluate the value of SMRs in England.

RPS England Vice-Chair Brendon Jiang said:

“We are concerned that changes to the PCN contract mean that structured medication reviews are being deprioritised by practices that are working flat out.

“With continued pressures across the health service, our members have warned that pharmacists are being re-directed from delivering structured medication reviews and tasked with other activities.

“Polypharmacy can potentially cause significant harm and it is vital that pharmacists can maximise their role in helping patients to get the most from their medicines and reducing avoidable hospital admissions.”

Read the full policy statement. 

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