Cheshire West priorities

9. Cheshire West priorities

NHS Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board (ICB) is responsible for planning NHS services for our population which include GP practices, pharmacies, NHS dentists, NHS opticians and hospitals. It serves a population of over 2.7m people across nine Places - Cheshire West, Cheshire East, Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens, Warrington and Wirral.

The Place Plan represents the shared vision for Cheshire West to maximise quality of life and opportunity for our residents. It is also the borough’s statutory Health and Wellbeing Strategy. The plan has ten priorities for Cheshire West:

• Addressing climate change
• Reducing inequalities
• Improving public mental health and wellbeing
• Promoting wellbeing and self-care
• Prevention and early detection
• Integrating our health and care services
• Making it easier to navigate health, social care, and community-based services
• Anticipating the future needs of our population
• Keeping people safe
• Ensuring we make the best use of our people and financial resources – spending the ‘Cheshire pound’ wisely and well, whilst improving service quality

Pharmacies play an important role in the community and are ideally placed to encourage and support people to make healthy choices, contributing to the priorities set out in Cheshire West’s Place Plan.

Community pharmacies contribute to the priorities by:

• Helping to improve the health of the population and reduce inequalities through the dispensing of medicines, providing formal consultations and informal advice, supporting self-care, giving medicines management advice including the New Medicine Service, and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.
• Adopting the framework of Healthy Living Pharmacy which is the consistent provision of a broad range of health improvement interventions to help increase the health and wellbeing of the local population and reduce health inequalities. One to one advice is provided on healthy lifestyle topics such as smoking cessation, weight management etc. This is opportunistic to patient groups who present prescriptions for dispensing.
• Participating in up to six public health campaigns each calendar year by promoting public health messages to users. The topics for these campaigns are selected by NHS England
• Enabling community pharmacy to play a bigger role than ever within the urgent care system through the Pharmacy First service. This service, together with the range of over-the-counter products and advice available in all pharmacies, contributes to improving patient self-care and management, as well as supporting the reduction of attendances at emergency departments and GP surgeries.
• Supporting climate change and sustainability through encouraging self-care and healthy living, repeat prescription ordering processes to reduce waste, supporting proper disposal of unwanted medicines, and promotion and support for lower carbon options. For example, supporting patients to use dry powder inhalers and to return metered dose inhalers for environmentally safe destruction. Medicines and the associated supply chain contribute around 25% of the overall NHS carbon footprint, and community pharmacies are in a unique position to support patients to take their medicines as intended, while avoiding over-ordering and stockpiling.
• Helping people to navigate the system by signposting to services not offered by the pharmacy.
• Providing the Discharge Medicine Service which allows NHS Trusts to refer patients who would benefit from extra guidance around prescribed medicines to their community pharmacy. The service has been identified by NHS England’s Medicines Safety Improvement Programme to be a significant contributor to the safety of patients at transitions of care, by reducing readmissions to hospital.
• Providing the influenza vaccination programme and the COVID-19 and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccines are at selected pharmacies. High immunisation rates are key to protecting the population’s health, preventing the spread of infectious disease, complications and possible early death among individuals.
• Offering the Hypertension case finding service increases the detection of undiagnosed hypertension within the local population and positively impacts health inequalities by targeting people who do not routinely access their GP or use other NHS services. Hypertension or high blood pressure, is a key risk factor for CVD, which is a key driver of health inequalities accounting for around 25% of the life expectancy gap between the rich and poor populations in England.