Supporting the integration of Community Pharmacy Services

West Yorkshire ICB has been using our digital tools to support their strategic ambitions for delivery of community pharmacy services across their patch.

The ICB came to the Strata team 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.

We enabled the ICB 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. Our developers were able to use the paper maps to pull out relevant information and input it digitally into the system to plot locations.

Once the areas were mapped, it was time to look at the pharmacy data available. Information about each pharmacy was exported from Excel files, so their map could identify which services – such as smoking cessation, blood pressure checks and the Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS) – were offered by which pharmacy.

Strata’s 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 the tool, 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 [Strata Enterprise] 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 Strata, you can sign up to Strata Enterprise. You sign up for an annual licence, and this gives you the ability to populate your own private, confidential workspace within Strata to populate with your own data, developer time to set up your bespoke data requests, and bespoke training sessions, plus all the prepopulated national data already available in the basic version of Strata.