Pharmacy practice and clinical
Overview
The Pharmacy practice and clinical group is one of three core disciplines within the School of Pharmacy.
Under the leadership of Dr Zoe Aslanpour, Professor Soraya Dhillon and Professor Fabrizio Schifano the discipline has received funding from charities, industry, NHS providers, professional bodies (including the GMC), and European bodies.
The group has an established reputation for research on the education and training of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, and is developing the approaches of Human Factors and Mindfulness.
The University of Hertfordshire is a business facing institution and members of the team regularly undertake consultancies for the Pharmacy industry and research for NHS providers.
Members of the Pharmacy practice and clinical group are also members of the Centre for Clinical Practice, Safe Medicines and Drug Misuse Research, formally approved in May 2011.
What the discipline covers
The team covers a range of aspects related to the training and education of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, including pedagogical research (learning and teaching), dissemination of best practice and professionalism, ethics and legal issues.
Key projects
The Centre researchers have recently completed a randomised, controlled, pilot study on the role of local community pharmacists providing an enhanced care package, compared vs typical GP care, in supporting diabetes type 2 clients. A preliminary draft of this study was a finalist in a recent General Pharmaceutical Council competition for best practice research studies. A revised version of this paper has now been published by a peer-reviewed international journal (Diabetes Medicine).
At present, the group is focussing on presenting the above model involving the enhanced care package provided by community pharmacists to the Department of Health’s Chief Scientific Officer. The model, which has been successfully implemented with the help of Manor Pharmacy, is viewed as an example of good practice in the provision of diagnostic/clinical services in primary care.
The group aims at providing the Department of Health with a description of the benefits that such model could bring if implemented more widely, together with the difficulties that have been encountered and the lessons that have been learnt along the way.
A multi-site, stratified sampling, controlled study, research grant application is being drafted at present to better understand if the very encouraging results observed in the pilot study currently being published can be confirmed in larger scale, UK-wide, studies.