Serial Prescribing FAQs for Community Pharmacy Initial Set Up Q1:

 What is the difference between Chronic Medication Service (CMS) and Medicines: Care and Review (MCR)?

A: MCR evolved from a review of the CMS service. It now focuses on three key elements: • Medication reviews • Pharmaceutical care planning • Serial prescribing Another fundamental change between the two models is that a patient does not require to be registered for MCR before a Serial Prescription can be generated by the GP practice team.

Will GP practice and Community Pharmacy teams receive training if they haven’t had this previously?

A: Training should be provided by the Health Board. It is likely to be provided by ePharmacy Facilitators or GP IT facilitators. To complement the Board-led training, eLearning modules and associated resources are also available from NHS Education for Scotland (NES) on Turas Learn.

Q3: What is the Shared Care Agreement and when should it be used?

A: The Shared Care Agreement is a document that should ideally be used before a practice begins to implement serial prescribing. It is designed to allow a two-way discussion between the GP practice team (including the practice based pharmacy team) and Community Pharmacy team and agree on certain aspects of the service as a partnership. This will include how to manage medication changes, any drugs/ patient groups who could be excluded from serial prescribing and management of the Treatment Summary Reports/next prescription request. Once all the questions have been answered and agreed, it can be saved and printed as a reference document. In urban settings, it could be more practical to have one shared care agreement between a GP practice Team and cluster of Community Pharmacy teams.