Dr. Richard Van Mellaerts, Co-Clinical Director, Kingston PCN
"As a PCN clinical director one of our biggest challenges was supporting and integrating a cohort of new clinical pharmacists and technicians into our PCN and due to this, we approached Soar Beyond to see how they can support.
After a discussion with Soar Beyond we recognised that our PCN could use their expertise to really shape the direction and delivery of the pharmacists and technicians across the PCN. We decided to go with their full support package which included a series of facilitated meetings, the SMART platform, and 1:1 sessions with our pharmacy team.
The facilitated 4D sessions really helped us crystalise what the pharmacy team could deliver and helped us shape a vision and strategy for the next two years, which Soar Beyond then converted into a roadmap of delivery and action plan for the team to follow. We have identified key priorities, milestones, and KPIs as part of the programme which we will use the SMART platform to measure progress against these.
As a clinical director, I now feel I have on hand expertise to support my team both via the SMART platform and their team of senior pharmacists, which means for me personally they have become vital members of our primary care team, and are hugely valued by our patients and colleagues."
Dr Kathryn Brown - Clinical Director, SEOx HA PCN
"SE Oxford Health Alliance chose to invest in the SMART Platform and facilitated 4D strategy sessions so that we could align member expectations and vision for the pharmacy workforce as well as providing clear, structured development and deployment plans.
Having the Soar Beyond team supporting us to do this through the structured 4D sessions has been powerful in gaining that shared vision and a structured 12 month plan that all member practices are signed up to. Anjna and the team have been really vested in our success from running the initial session with the practices, defining desired competencies, supporting with recruitment and interviews and now customising the project-managed approach to delivery planning.
As Clinical Directors, the major concern for the pharmacist workforce is how we can best support them to be successful but without requiring too much support and time from us to supervise and manage. I have found that SMART has provided clarity of pharmacist workforce competencies and deliverables with the focussed development and implementation plans. This has actually made this far less work for me than if I had been trying to create such a support framework myself and this has also empowered my senior pharmacist to take a PCN-wide approach to workforce delivery."
Juliet Fletcher - Senior Meds Optimisation Pharmacist and Senior Lead Pharmacist for Sunderland GP Alliance
"We commissioned SMART for our pharmacy workforce in March 2020 recognising that we had ambitious plans to rapidly expand the workforce in the next two years and that we needed a structured framework to ensure standardised delivery of the clinical pharmacist and technician role across our 6 PCNs.
The support we commissioned, including 4D Accelerator sessions with our senior pharmacists, ensured a shared vision and agreed set of competencies as well as a delivery plan for the service. This enabled us to use the SMART platform to quickly create a map of baseline competencies and capabilities which highlighted and identified training and development needs. We now have a focused development plan and set of agreed service milestones, KPIs including DES deliverables like SMRs; best of all, we have visibility of all of these to share with our PCNs.
Having expanded our team rapidly to already having 25 clinical pharmacists and 6 technicians, SMART has been vital in providing assurance to the PCNs about the quality of the pharmacy workforce and has given us all clarity of service deliverables and priorities. Because Soar Beyond also has the i2i Network, we have been delighted that we are now addressing one of our key development needs around managing frail older patients by implementing a federation-wide quality improvement (QI) initiative including training, upskilling and systematic review and management.
I feel the structure of the SMART platform and the wrap-around support of the Soar Beyond team has been instrumental in helping us to rapidly standardise and provide a quality service and would recommend this for services- both large and small."
Dr Sophie Taylor - Clinical Director, High Peak PCN
"The consultation and demo from Soar Beyond highlighted the support we needed as a PCN with developing our strategy around pharmacist services. We saw how the SMART Platform would support our senior pharmacist in supporting and developing the new team we were recruiting. We felt the platform would provide focus to ensure key deliverables required by the PCN were met by the pharmacist team to deliver for example on the DES and generally support the GPs with their workload.
Subsequently the PCN decided to go ahead with the SMART platform and the 4D Strategy Workshops. We are now using the platform and are about to run the second in the series of workshops with Soar Beyond and have been very satisfied with the results so far!”
Meena Thakur - Clinical Lead, East Harrow PCN
“Soar Beyond has co-ordinated a proactive approach to support our practice to implement a pharmacist led programme, to develop a systematised repeat prescribing process including a proactive medication review & QOF process which has significantly reduced the entire practice prescription workload by 50% not only for the pharmacists but also our practice admin. team. We are now able to recommend and replicate a process across the PCN”
