The latest essential service to be introduced to Community Pharmacy is called the Discharge Medicines Service (DMS).
What is the Discharge Medicines Service (DMS)?
The service is essentially a referral programme. Hospital clinicians can refer patients they are discharging to a community pharmacy if they feel it would be beneficial for the patient to receive further guidance and consultation on their newly prescribed medicines.
For more in-depth descriptions of the structure and aims of the service, the PSNC website has a lot of useful information.
What does it mean for locums?
The service requires GPhC registered pharmacists and technicians be trained and accredited to support the delivery of this service.
As it is an essential service, customers expect the majority, if not all, qualifying locums to be accredited to deliver this service.
How can a locum get accredited?
According to the PSNC, training and competence requirements to deliver this service are as follows:
Read the section on DMS within the NHSE&I guidance on the regulations (Essential)
Read the DMS toolkit. (Essential)
Complete the CPPE NHS Discharge Medicines Service eLearning and assessment. (Highly recommended)
Complete the DMS Declaration of Competence. (Essential)
Please follow these four steps and then upload your valid DMS Declaration of Competence (DoC) to your Pharmaseekers account.
IMPORTANT: As step 1 and 2 are NOT CPPE based activities, they may not automatically appear on your DoC statement. Please be sure to make note of these steps (including a completion date) in the Learning and assessments completed from other providers section of your DoC statement.
If you wish to know more about the Declaration of Competence process, you can watch our quick video on this blog: A Brief Overview of CPPE Declarations of Competence (DoC)
Follow these steps to upload your Declaration to your account:
Log on and click the documents cog
Select Upload Core Documents
Upload your evidence in the correct place using the Choose file button
Press Upload
As always, please contact us with any questions or queries you have.