North East London Local Pharmaceutical Committee

Details of the Report on Mental Health Training Day by NEL LPC

Mental Health Training on Sunday, 5th February 2012.

Moving from Policy to Practice.

Over 80 pharmacists attended a training course to hear about the latest

Policies on and Practice of Mental Health and in particular anxiety and depression.


Please click on the link to see the full report of the Mental Health Training Day


updated 05.03.2012

Here is an update on the mental health service initiative. We are working with the NHS (NELFT) and urge you to visit the following site: http://www.choiceandmedication.org/nelft/. Would your patients know more about the drugs they are taking than you as their pharmacist?

As the Clinical Commissioning Groups take responsibility for prescribing and better management of long term conditions like diabetes, CHD and mental health there would be pressure on prescribing volume and budgets. This is where community pharmacists need to become active or lose income and opportunities to make the community healthier.

As we see it, the outcome we want to see is for community pharmacists to be more involved in the care of people with mental health problems, i.e. for community pharmacists to be considered as part of the overall “team” looking after people with MH problems. And the vision needs to be broken down into manageable chunks, quite simply at first this could be a) the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (and pre-IAPT) type patients and b) the Serious Mental Illness type patients in secondary care (and maybe in the Waltham Forest long term mental health conditions pilot service.)

And we would want to be thinking about ensuring that community pharmacists have consistent information to give to people with MH problems according to what type of patient presents in the pharmacy setting and maybe ensure that there might be some working protocols for the care of people with SMI who might, for example, stop taking their medication or show some other relapse indicator that the community pharmacist might need to inform the care co-ordinator about.

Our aim is to develop a base for community pharmacy-based mental health service but initially starting with anxiety and depression and a simple referral service for IAPT. The eventual goal is to produce a value added service which we have called MUR+. Patients could be referred to the service by other healthcare professionals under their care.

The facts and figures around Mental Health in the UK are alarming.
• 1 in 4 people will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year
• Mixed anxiety and depression is the most common mental disorder in Britain
• Women are more likely to have been treated for a mental health problem than men
• About 10% of children have a mental health problem at any one time
• Depression affects 1 in 5 older people
• Suicides rates show that British men are three times as likely to die by suicide than British women
• Self-harm statistics for the UK show one of the highest rates in Europe: 400 per 100,000 population
• Only 1 in 10 prisoners has no mental disorder

Please click on the link below to see more MPs Launch the New Medicines Services organized by the LPC

Jon Cruddas MP            Dagenham & Rainham
Margaret Hodge MP      Barking
Mike Gapes MP             Redbridge
Stephens Timms MP      Newham
Andrew Rosindell MP    Havering

Please click on the link  below to see the report of the NMS +tMUR training day with the LPC.

There were one hundred and ninety five Contractors and Locums
who attended the Training Day at the County Hotel.