Liguria. Change your general practitioner in the pharmacy, without going to the ASL counters. Then it will be the turn of the electronic file followed by a series of monitoring e screening which will make prevention more convenient and widespread. The experimentation of a series of new activities and services that will be made available to citizens by the 600 pharmacies throughout Liguria is ready to start on 1 July.
The time schedule for the activation of the new services was drawn up by the regional commission for the pharmacy of services and approved by the regional council, on the proposal of the president and councilor for health Giovanni Toti, in implementation of the national agreements approved in the State-Regions Conference. The approval by the Ministry of Health of the time schedule of activities launched by the junta will allow the use, at regional level, of the funding assigned to Liguria, amounting to over 1.5 million euros.
“The goal is to to make life easier for citizens, especially those who are fragile or live in the hinterland, for example – Toti recalls – also through the offer of a series of services related to health 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’. Starting from this absolutely positive and virtuous experience – he adds – in the coming months we will activate another series of activities that will be made available to citizens in pharmacies, starting from 1 July next, from the possibility of changing their general practitioner without having to go to the ASL counters “.
Among the services that will be offered by pharmacies, the possibility for chronic patients, for example suffering from diabetes o hypertension, to take advantage of a program aimed at improving adherence to therapy and to carry out a series of checks with the aim of prevention; it will be possible to do it in the pharmacy some tests such as blood pressure holter, cardiac holter and electrocardiogram; access to the electronic health record; it will be possible for people with diabetes to take capillary blood at the pharmacy to measure blood sugar and glycated hemoglobin; an activity of screening for the prevention of colon cancer.
All 600 regional pharmacies in Liguria will participate in one or more trials linked 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 care as well as pharmacovigilance. A specific training activity is foreseen for each individual project.
“The close collaboration between Federfarma Liguria and the Liguria Region has made it possible to develop projects that will ultimately benefit the citizens – he declares Elisabetta Borachia, president of Federfarma Liguria – who will have more and more services available within the network of local pharmacies which are distributed in a capillary way. It is important to underline that these innovative services are initially activated in an experimental form but at the end of this phase we hope they will become continuous, increasing the number of population groups reached by pharmacies more and more “.
“I’m almost 100 thousand users involved, equal to over 6% of the regional population, a significant number that will give us reliable indications. The anti-Covid or influenza vaccinations, which will continue to be carried out in pharmacies even after the emergency, thanks to the approval of a national law, also go in the same direction as a consolidation of the offer of services to citizens. 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 model of local healthcare that 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”.
Services of front office which will be activated:
• from 1 July 2022, family doctor change
• starting from January 1, 2023, activities to facilitate access to electronic health records (initial target of about 300 people)
Chronic pathology detection and monitoring services:
• 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, the project for monitoring adherence to drug therapy in patients with hypertension will start – target of 5,000 patients – objectives: to highlight subjects at risk of aggravation due to lack of adherence to therapy (including through questionnaires), to reduce non-pressure events control yourself;
• 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 the treatment of type 2 diabetes (insulin or oral and / or injectable hypoglycemic agents);
• From 1 October 2022 the screening project to identify patients suffering from diabetic pathology will start – target of 5400 patients – objective: to identify patients at risk;
• From January 1, 2023, start of a project for the recognition of drug therapy for about 350 patients (target of the trial) who follow chronic or oncological therapy.
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, also the enrollment of patients for the measurement of autospirometry – Objective: to involve 5600 subjects who need a control of respiratory and cardiovascular parameters in order to facilitate access to this type of exams and reduce waiting lists;
• starting from 1 January 2023, 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 a project for the collection of capillary blood for the detection of glycated hemoglobin – target 2400 patients – objective: to help diabetic patients in the management of the disease.