Is community pharmacy a missed opportunity in suicide prevention?

Conference:

SAPC ASM 2019 - Exeter

Talk Code:

1A.1

Presenter:

Hayley Gorton

Twitter:

@hayley_gorton

Co-authors:

Donna Littlewood, Christine Lotfallah, Matthew Spreadbury, Kai-Ling Wong, Patricia Gooding, Darren Ashcroft

Author institutions:

The Univeristy of Manchester

Problem

The contribution of primary care is central to suicide and self-harm prevention strategies in the UK. Community pharmacies are a core contributor to primary care with 1.8 million people visiting a pharmacy in England each day. However, they are seldom mentioned in these strategies. Public Health England names pharmacists as “partners in effective suicide prevention” and the Scottish Government include pharmacists in their 2018 plan for mandatory suicide prevention training. However, the current training level and experience of community pharmacy staff in suicide and self-harm prevention is unknown. We therefore aimed to establish the current and potential role of community pharmacy teams in suicide and self-harm awareness and prevention, and identify any potential training requirements.

Approach

We recruited 25 community pharmacy staff who worked in the North West of England, using purposive sampling. This included pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, dispensing or counter assistants and delivery drivers. We conducted face-to-face, semi-structured qualitative interviews and identified emerging themes using inductive, latent, thematic analysis. No new codes were generated from the last three interviews, signalling that the data were saturated.

Findings

Many pharmacy staff members shared an example of their involvement in the care of someone who was suicidal or self-harming. The extent of the involvement varied and some had no examples of such interactions. No participants had received specific training on suicide or self-harm but all welcomed the suggestion of participating in training. The emerging themes of (i) Relationship with patient and ii) Pharmacy environment were seen as facilitators which, if supported by (iii) Training , could support an enhanced role by community pharmacy teams through: (iv) Opportunities for contact, (v) Facilitated referral pathway and (vi) Restricting access to means.

Consequences

We report on the first UK study to investigate the role of community pharmacy teams in suicide and self-harm prevention. Community pharmacy teams have some experience in suicide and self-harm prevention, but have no formal training and rely upon referral and signposting to help people. If supported by adequate training, community pharmacy teams considered themselves to be suitable contributors to the suicide and self-harm and identified opportunities to do so. Community pharmacy teams are therefore important features in the battery of suicide prevention approaches in primary care.

Submitted by:

Hayley Gorton

Funding acknowledgement:

This study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research through the Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (NIHR Greater Manchester PSTRC), grant No. PSTRC-2016-003. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health and Social Care. The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.