Welcome to Community Pharmacy Lincolnshire News

Bank Holiday Rota

We are working with NHS England to ensure good planning for Bank Holiday cover across Lincolnshire.

If you have not completed and returned your bank holiday opening, or you are unsure if this has been completed yet for your pharmacy, please download the current rota here:
 

• Bank holiday rota poster at 22.03.22

If you find your organisation on the Lincolnshire tab and there are no details in the bank holiday columns, please could you fill your details in on the relevant row and send it to the england.eastmidspharmacy@nhs.net email address.
 
Thank you for your assistance

Closures: Business Continuity Planning 

Whilst it has been a difficult time for our contractors in remaining open throughout the pandemic, there may be occasions where you may not have a pharmacist available or be working behind closed doors.

We wish to remind you all that it is important to ensure that your business continuity plans are kept up to date, and should include steps to make sure that you avoid downloading prescriptions from the spine which stop the patient being able to be signposted to other pharmacies. This makes sure that the impact on patients, other pharmacies and GP practices are kept to a minimum.

In addition to notifying NHS England, as noted in our recent correspondence in this newsletter, it would be helpful to send an email regarding the extent of any service reduction to the CCG, (also copying us at the LPC in at info@pharmacylincolnshire.org), so they can inform GP Practices too. The CCG can be emailed on lccg.primarycarelincs@nhs.net.

For further information on reporting unplanned closures please visit our website at https://pharmacylincolnshire.org/resources-a-z/unplanned-pharmacy-closures/

GP-CPCS Referrals

Ensuring GP Practices receive notification of completed consultation

We know that uptake of GPCPCS is slowly increasing at GP practices across the county.  It is really important that we make sure the GPCPCS service is completed appropriately on PharmOutcomes, whether via direct send from PharmOutcomes or via copying and pasting into an email back to the practice.

We want to make sure that GP practices refer as many patients as possible to contractors, so it is in all our interests to get the system working.  We recognise that the IT solution is not seamless, but a little bit of preparation can help iron out some minor issues that we have come across.

With this in mind, when surgeries contact you to trial refer a test patient, please can we make sure that the referral both arrives in the pharmacy (either via PharmRefer directly into PharmOutcomes or via nhs.net mail) and then goes back into the practice workflow, before the 'real' patients are sent over.  We know from early referrals that the practices need to have a current email address set up on Pinnacle to enable the completed paperwork to return back to them. The process for pharmacies is shown in blue on the chart below:



We are working with the CCG to communicate the steps for setting up referrals, as we have been for about a year now, and we have a range of resources on our webpage for both pharmacies and GP practices here:

https://pharmacylincolnshire.org/services/advanced-services/community-pharmacy-consultation-service-cpcs/gp-referral-to-cpcs/

 

MYS update for resubs 

Contractors signed up to the Manage Your Services (MYS) portal can receive their referred back (prescription returns) and disallowed items digitally using the portal instead of these being received via the post from the NHSBSA.

Currently, using the MYS portal to receive referred back and disallowed items is optional and contractors need to contact the MYS team by emailing nhsbsa.mys@nhs.net or via telephone 0300 330 1368 to enable access to these features on the MYS portal.  Once these features are enabled on MYS, paper referred back and disallowed items will no longer be posted to the pharmacy.

Using MYS for receiving digital referred back and disallowed items means contractors:

• receive these items sooner;
• can provide information required to processes referred back items faster;
• can submit a challenge for any disallowed items electronically;
• can track the progress of any referred back items throughout until the point they are processed; and
• do not risk losing these items in transit.

For more information on referred back items please refer to PSNC’s webpage on Prescription returns.

Pharmacy contractors who have not already registered for MYS can download and complete the form on the NHSBSA’s website and send it to nhsbsa.mys@nhs.net.