Pharmacies are an important garrison for the area, especially in the hinterland and in smaller towns, as demonstrated also during the pandemic emergency. To strengthen this role, an experimentation will start in six hundred pharmacies in the Ligurian territory which will provide citizens with a series of new activities.
The new services will be activated on the basis of a time schedule drawn up by the regional commission for pharmacy services and approved by the regional council, on the proposal of the president and councilor for health, in implementation of the national agreements approved in the state-regions conference.
The Ligurian President Giovanni Toti said: “The goal is to make life easier for citizens, in particular for those who are fragile or live in the hinterland, for example, also through the offer of a series of health-related services. and prevention. Pharmacies have been a fundamental safeguard for prevention, information to citizens and also for vaccination throughout the period of the coronavirus emergency, demonstrating the strategic importance of their role as networked ‘service pharmacies’ “.
Among the first services to come into force there will be the one for the change of your general practitioner, active from July 1st and which will prevent citizens from going to the ASL counters to make the request. In the course of 2022 and in the first months of 2023 further activities will be implemented, Toti himself anticipated: “In the coming months we will activate another series of activities that will be made available to citizens in pharmacies”.
The approval of the time schedule of activities – launched by the council – by the Ministry of Health will allow the use of the loans assigned to Liguria, amounting to over 1.5 million euros, to improve the health service.
Among the services that will be offered by pharmacies, the possibility for chronic patients, suffering for example from diabetes or hypertension, to take advantage of a program aimed at improving adherence to therapy and to carry out a series of checks for prevention purposes.
It will also be possible to carry out some tests in the pharmacy such as blood pressure holter, cardiac holter and electrocardiogram; access to the electronic health record will be facilitated; it will be possible for people with diabetes to take capillary blood at the pharmacy to measure blood sugar and glycated hemoglobin; a screening activity will be carried out for the prevention of colon cancer.
The participating pharmacies
All 600 territorial pharmacies in Liguria will participate in one or more experiments related to the various projects: the pharmacists who join the projects will follow the courses organized by the provincial orders of pharmacists in agreement with Alisa on the issues of adherence to therapies, the fragility of chronic patients and their management as well as pharmacovigilance.
A specific training activity is foreseen for each individual project, which will be carried out in collaboration between Federfarma Liguria and the Region. Citizens will have more and more services available within the network of local pharmacies which are distributed throughout the territory.
These services will be activated in an experimental form but once this phase is over, if there are no criticalities, they can become continuous, increasing the number of population groups reached by the pharmacies more and more. Almost 100,000 users are involved, equal to over 6% of the regional population, a significant number that will give reliable indications.
In the direction of a consolidation of the offer of services to citizens, anti-Covid or flu vaccinations also go, which will continue to be carried out in pharmacies even after the emergency, thanks to the approval of a national law.
Elisabetta Borachia, president of Federfarma Liguria, declared: “For our part, everything is ready for the start of an experiment of extraordinary strategic value, which will bring pharmacies and pharmacists exactly where they want to go, at the center of that new territorial health model of proximity which is one of the objectives of the NRP. It will be a question of fully hitting all the objectives identified in the time schedule, which we wrote together with the Region in the Regional Commission for Pharmacy Services, obviously keeping within the framework of national regulations and agreements “.
The services being activated
_ Front office services that will be activated:
- from 1 July 2022, family doctor change
- starting from 1 January 2023, activities to facilitate access to electronic health records (initial target of about 300 people)
_ Identification and monitoring services for chronic diseases:
- from 1 October 2022, start of a project for monitoring adherence to drug therapy in patients with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) – target of 400 patients who use medicines for obstructive respiratory tract disorders – objectives: to improve adherence to therapy
- from 1 October 2022 start of the project to monitor adherence to drug therapy in patients with hypertension – target of 5,000 patients – objectives: to highlight subjects at risk of aggravation due to lack of adherence to therapy (also through questionnaires), to reduce uncontrolled blood pressure events ;
- from 1 October 2022 the project for monitoring adherence to drug therapy in patients with type 2 diabetes will start – about 2,400 subjects to be enrolled among those who use medicines for treatment of type 2 diabetes (insulin or oral and / or injectable hypoglycemic agents);
- starting from 1 October 2022 the screening project to identify patients suffering from diabetic disease – target of 5400 patients – objective: to identify patients at risk;
- from 1 January 2023, the project for the recognition of drug therapy for about 350 patients (target of the trial) who follow chronic or oncological therapy will start.
_ Second level services:
- starting from 1 July 2022, the enrollment of patients for the measurement project of the pressure Holter, cardiac Holter, ECG will begin.
- from 1 October 2022, including the enrollment of patients for the measurement of autospirometry – Objective: to involve 5,600 subjects who need a control of respiratory and cardiovascular parameters in order to facilitate access to this type of exams and reduce waiting lists;
- from 1 January 2023, start of oncology screening project for colorectal cancer prevention – Objective: to increase the number of subjects who undergo the test, providing for a maximum number of 69,850 subjects involved. Since in Liguria the number of eligible subjects (adults aged between 50 and 69 years) is about 470 thousand people and, of these, 30% have already been enrolled, the objective indicated is to enroll in the first year of experimentation of around 69 thousand citizens in the indicated range, with the participation of all pharmacies.
_ Other activities:
- Anti covid vaccination: preliminary activity and activation of the territorial vaccination points (already underway since April 2021)
- from 1 October 2022, start of project for capillary blood sampling for the detection of glycated hemoglobin – target 2400 patients – objective: to help diabetic patients in the management of the disease