By Jagjot Kaur Chahal, Lead Author for RPS Interim Professional Standards for Hospital at Home and Cardiovascular Prevention Lead Pharmacist, Barts Health NHS Trust.
New interim RPS professional standards for pharmacy services for Hospital at Home, including Virtual Wards, are much needed. They have been developed to establish and maintain safe and effective Hospital at Home pharmacy services across the UK and are aimed at the multidisciplinary team, across all sectors, to quality assure and improve pharmacy services.
What is Hospital at Home (virtual wards)?
Hospital at Home is essentially an alternative to traditional in-hospital care, enabled by technology. This innovative approach allows individuals who would typically be in a hospital bed to receive acute care, monitoring, and treatment within the comfort of their own homes or a more familiar environment. The goal is to prevent unnecessary hospital admissions and facilitate early discharge. Initially, this model was primarily focused on areas like respiratory and frailty specialities and is now expanding into other clinical domains such as heart failure, diabetes management, and peri-operative care.
What does this mean for pharmacy?
With all innovative models of care involving medicines, a senior pharmacy lead should have strategic, system and operational involvement at the outset. Hospital at Home implementation must have a systems approach, where working across traditional organisational boundaries should be business as usual. Building on existing pharmacy services within the system is key, creating seamless integration of providers involved, across the acute trusts, community trusts and primary care including community pharmacy teams. This multi-agency working around pharmaceutical care requires oversight of governance for medicines use and processes such as:
- Structured risk assessment of the pharmacy service processes
- Pharmacists prescribing within scope their of practice
- Share learning amongst all collaborators
- Clear mechanisms of medicines supply in and out of hours
Hospital at Home offers patients more choices and also enhances their overall care experience by allowing them to receive treatment in the familiar surroundings of their home. Additionally, it creates opportunities for the workforce, such as taking on joint roles across different sectors and using the skills of independent prescribers and advanced clinical practitioners. Some staff may work remotely, monitoring the patient in real-time and others may provide face-to-face interventions such as administering intravenous therapies.
Hospital at Home is a rapidly evolving arena, and it is encouraging that pharmacy professionals continue to share good practice to add to the growing evidence base.
If you’d like to know more, take a look at the Interim Professional Standards for Hospital at Home, including Virtual Wards, Pharmacy Services.
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