Pharm-CONNECT: Pharmacy roles and continuity in general practice

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Pharm-CONNECT Continuity of Care in General Practice Multidisciplinary Teams: Understanding the Impact of Pharmacy Roles and Measuring Continuity Across the Wider Team

• IRAS ID

  351121

• Contact name

  Nada Khan

• Contact email

  n.khan@exeter.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Exeter Sponsorship Team

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 4 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  Traditional general practice care involves a GP looking after a group or a list of patients. This allows GPs and patients to build long-term relationships over many years. This is called ‘continuity of care’. Patients who have high levels of continuity of care can experience better outcomes from their care.

  General practice is rapidly changing, with more people from different professional backgrounds working as part of the team. Patients may now see a pharmacist for some of their care that in the past would have involved seeing their GP. This project aims to look at continuity of care when more professionals are caring for patients in general practice. The first part of the study will find out what patients, GPs, pharmacists think about continuity of care, and care provided by a wider professional team. To do this, we will interview patients, GPs and pharmacists about their ways of working and sharing information. We want to better understand how GPs and pharmacists communicate to support continuity. We will also ask patients what they think about having different people coordinate their care.
  To see how well a general practice is providing continuity of care, we need to be able to measure it. The second part of this project looks to develop a way to measure continuity of care amongst teams working in general practice. We will do this by speaking to patients, GPs, pharmacists and researchers and getting their opinions about the best way to do this. If we can measure continuity of care amongst general practice teams, we can see how well a practice is providing continuity of care. If we can measure continuity, we can work to improve it. We will develop recommendations for ways to measure continuity of care and will aim to test these out in the future.
  

• REC name

  London - South East Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  25/PR/0788

• Date of REC Opinion

  19 Jun 2025

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion