A study in Scotland has found pharmacy technicians can provide pharmacists working in GP surgeries with good support by taking the lead on various jobs including most prescribing management-related tasks.

Researchers from the University of Strathclyde and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde evaluated the proposition of a pharmacy technician-led hub overseeing and completing activities such as medicines reconciliation from immediate discharge letters (IDL), the processing of outpatient prescription requests (OPL) and special request prescriptions (SR).

The study was carried out in three practices in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde over four weeks last year and involved around 23,800 patients. In total, pharmacy technicians completed 4,485 tasks including 3,917 SRs, 323 IDLs and 245 OPLs. Researchers said 921 tasks required the support of a pharmacist where “workload exceeded technician resource.”

Pharmacy technicians completed most tasks within “a locally agreed 48-hour benchmark turnaround” time and failed to do so in one per cent, three per cent and two per cent of SRs, IDLs and OPLs respectively.

Of the 383 tasks that were referred to a pharmacist, 134 could only have been carried out by pharmacists because of “the need for a prescribing decision or pharmacist-specific knowledge” while 226 could have been completed by pharmacy technicians “with additional knowledge or training” such as answering patients’ questions about medicines, interpretating clinical parameters and blood monitoring.

Researchers concluded pharmacy technicians “convincingly completed most activities” but said the pharmacist referral rate could “be improved by upskilling” technicians. They also said SRs “could be managed more effectively by converting suitable SR tasks to controlled repeats.”