Collaborative Practice in GPs and Community Pharmacy (CoPGPCP)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Development of a tool to facilitate collaborative working between GPs and community pharmacists
IRAS ID
272926
Contact name
Simon Harris
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Greenlight Healthcare Ltd
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
N/A, N/A
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 2 months, 0 days
Research summary
Research has shown that patients’ care can be improved by community pharmacists (CPs) and GPs working closely together on how they prescribe medicines for patients and how they check the medicines are working properly. CPs and GPs working in a joined-up way like this is known as collaborative working.
Studies to understand what makes for good collaborative working between CPs and GPs have found things that help, like the GP and the pharmacist actually knowing each other and when they are comfortable talking to each other. There are other things that have been found to help as well and researchers have created diagrams or models showing how these come together to make for good collaborative working.
One model developed in the UK has a list of things that can make collaborative working good, which are called factors, and three levels of how good the collaborative working is. At level 1 there is no collaborative working, at level 2 there is a little bit of collaborative working and at level 3 there is lot of collaborative working.
We found problems, however, with trying to use the model with a group of CPs and GPs to work out how good their collaborative working was. In this project we plan to work out exactly what changes we need to make to the model.
To do this, we need to check that we have found all of the problems and see if experts agree on solutions to these problems. The experts will include CPs, GPs, national experts on collaborative working and patients. We will use a process called the Delphi technique to see if they can agree on solutions.
At the end of the research we will have developed a tool that pharmacists and GPs can use to determine how they can work better together.
REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/PR/0278
Date of REC Opinion
12 Mar 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion