During October and November 2015 the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education ran a national campaign on Acute Kidney Injury to engage the pharmacy professions with this high priority area. This covered 65,000 registered pharmacy professionals across England.
We developed a six week programme of activities, which sought to progressively engage different members of the team and culminated in every member of the team being asked to make a public commitment to the change that they were going to make. We intend to return to these commitments in Spring 2016 and share the outcomes and impact in time for World Kidney Day 2016 on 10 March.
We started with two animations that explored the difference that could have been made in community or hospital settings if the pharmacy team had remembered to Think Kidney with their patients. Despite being simple, these made a big impact and we have now had requests from other NHS teams to embed these on their websites.
We moved on to our ‘All About Kidneys’ knowledge challenge. This was a ten question quiz which we hosted on our website. It tested people’s knowledge about kidney disease and linked them to key sources of learning or information to provide them with the evidence for the different responses. The quiz has been transferred to our Medicines Quiz App so it continues to stimulate learning on the topic as a legacy from this campaign.
Our third stage was to distribute the open learning programme to all registered pharmacy professionals across England. We had raised awareness of this with our launch at the Pharmacy Show in Birmingham – using a live Periscope feed to enable access for those who couldn’t attend the conference.
We then moved on to supporting the team members with applying the learning in their own practice, with articles specifically for pharmacy technicians in two separate journals highlighting their role in supporting people at risk of developing AKI. Our engagement with the wider pharmacy support team consisted of a podcast and a poster challenge – encouraging them to develop posters (for staff or customers) with their key messages and intended changes. The corridor here in the CPPE office is still decorated with our office team’s colourful attempts.
Our final challenge was for people to share their commitment to making a difference for their customers. Our colleagues at the Think Kidney programme developed a web page to capture people’s pledges and are now getting back in touch with people to find out how they got on. We were fortunate to work with the NHS Specialist Pharmacy Services in developing a national audit for hydration messages, which all community pharmacies in England are encouraged to participate in and feed in their results at a national level. When we last received an update, over 200 pharmacies had participated with over 2000 people being given advice on hydration.
If you want to explore our campaign, posters that people sent in to us to share their work, or to see the animations that we developed, then have a look at www.cppe.ac.uk/aki and watch the videos and animations that we host there.
Matthew Shaw
Matthew is deputy director of the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education within Manchester Pharmacy School. After graduating as a pharmacist, Matthew worked in hospital pharmacy practice, where he set up and lead a Rheumatology Outpatient Clinic. Making the move to community pharmacy, Matthew ran a pharmacy based HbA1c testing service in collaboration with local GP practices and Bayer UK. He then moved to work for the National Pharmacy Association supporting pharmacists across the North of England and Yorkshire in setting up new services and bidding for funding from their PCTs, predominantly to support minor ailment services and public health. In 2002 he moved to work for CPPE, supporting the national services being set up by the Department of Health which has continued through to the now commonplace provision of MURs, NMS and public health support. He was delighted to lead this six week campaign to encourage the pharmacy workforce to engage actively in promoting kidney health.
Matthew was delighted to submit his career history for the first wave of RPS faculty applications and was pleased to be one of the first Fellows of the RPS Faculty. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in 2015.