Pharmacy Rotation - Week 1

Time is flying by and I can’t believe a week has past! So I thought I’d give you an update on my rotation.

Last week I started my rotation at the National Health Service in Edinburgh. Most of my time has been spent in meetings with different individuals who have helped me to understand various aspects of a nationalized health care system, including data collection, privacy management, public health services, and prescribing, which vary considerably from the US System. One amazing statistic is that NHS has the ability to analyze the prescribing of around 98% of prescription medications in this country due to newer technology that tract prescriptions. Therefore, this offers a lot of unique opportunities for interventions and research that can not be done in the US where that kind of data covering the whole population doesn’t exist.  As this rotation is also serving as my practicum for my Masters in Public Health, it has been very interesting to compare the different public health approaches in this country.So far, I have been very impressed by what I am learning about Scottish Health Care because, since they have an amazing amount of data concerning their own populations, they can make very specific targeted interventions to improve health care delivery. Pharmacists also have many more responsibilities within the health care system. For example, pharmacists can prescribe in the UK, so they have the ability to make a lot of interventions in chronic disease management. The NHS also has a pretty inspiring vision for advancing pharmacy in Scotland. If you are interested to learn more, this Prescription For Excellence report details the plan for pharmacists in the UK:

I’ve also been learning a little about my project which will look at antimicrobial stewardship which will look at the use of antibiotics which are more prone to cause a hospital-associated infection known as Clostridium Difficile. Today,  I had the opportunity to travel to Glasgow (Scotland’s largest city) and attend a meeting of the Scottish Antimicrobial Prescribing Group and learn about the different approaches that National Health Service is taking to reduce inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics. It was extremely interesting to hear reports using their national data about the status of prescribing and the new projects in development to further improve it.

It’s been a great learning experience so far and I can’t wait to delve further into my research project this week!