Supporting the integration of Community Pharmacy Services
West Yorkshire ICB has been using SHAPE to support their strategic ambitions for delivery of community pharmacy services across their patch.
The ICB came to SHAPE this year to ask if the software could help them understand the provision of pharmaceutical services and digitally map locations across the region, with a key focus on understanding services available in rural areas and which GPs feed patients through to them.
SHAPE Local enabled the team to have their own private workspace which they could populate with private datasets to gain a really clear picture of what they wanted to understand. The challenge encountered was that data held was old, incomplete, and much of it was on paper maps. SHAPE developers were able to use the paper maps to pull out relevant information and input it digitally into SHAPE to plot locations.
Once the areas were mapped in SHAPE, it was time to look at the pharmacy data available. Information about each pharmacy was exported from Excel files, so their SHAPE Local could identify which services – such as smoking cessation, blood pressure checks and the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS) – were offered by which pharmacy.
SHAPE developers then worked with the ICB to show the data in Primary Care Network areas, to help underpin their work on service integration. They were also able to visually demonstrate, through weighted lines, which GP surgeries prescriptions originated from. The thicker the line, the higher the volume of prescriptions claimed.
Alongside the input of this bespoke information, the ICB were also able to correlate their pharmacy data against the extensive information already available in SHAPE, such as population demographics and areas of deprivation, giving them even more insight to shape their future plans.
Gillian Sealey, Primary Care Programme Manager at NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, said:
“The development of our West Yorkshire SHAPE Local has been a great asset in the day-to-day management of pharmaceutical services. It has helped us develop further the work we already carry out and support understanding of pharmaceutical services in the region. It is intended that we communicate the development of the tool and adapt it to include other primary care services so that other system partners can use it as intended.”
If you’re interested in developing bespoke functionality within SHAPE, you can sign up to SHAPE Local. You sign up for an annual licence, and this gives you the ability to populate your own private, confidential workspace within SHAPE to populate with your own data, four days of developer time to set up your bespoke data requests, and three bespoke training sessions, plus all the prepopulated national data already available in the basic version of SHAPE.
