Walk in my Shoes (WIMS)

‘Walk in my Shoes’ looks to create a greater level of engagement between community pharmacy and GP practice teams to help understand each other’s roles, improve working relationships and ultimately provide better care for their patients.   

GP practice and community pharmacy teams do not typically meet regularly to discuss working practices.  This can be due to pressure of work, including the statutory requirements for pharmacists to be on the pharmacy premises for the duration of their opening hours.  The most frequent interactions between the two teams occur when each other requires clarification about an item on the prescription.  These interactions are by their nature reactive and usually relate to a problem or issue.

Community Pharmacy West Yorkshire are encouraging community pharmacy teams to engage with ‘Walk in my Shoes’ which should help with:

• Utilisation of NHS services such as MURs and NMS which can have a positive impact on patient care.
• Making the care navigation process as smooth as possible by ensuring only those patients that should be care navigated to pharmacy are.
• Helping to manage patients expectations with the changes to OTC prescribing by ensuring patients receive succinct mirrored messages from both teams.
• Help to release some pressures on each by having clear mutually agreed processes around medicine prescribing, ordering and dispensing processes.

All of the above aim to build trust to the working relationship of GP Practices and community pharmacy teams.

The toolkit for the Walk in my Shoes can be found at: https://psnc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/PSNC-Briefing-041.17-Walk-in-my-Shoes-toolkit.pdf. 

There is also a video link to explain the project: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3flk5akw0x5euhb/Walk%20in%20My%20Shoes%20V5.wmv?dl=0.

Last Updated: 29th March 2019