Numark focus on engaging patients with successful workshops

OVER the last decade the focus of the NHS has changed, from simply treating ill health to improving the health of the nation through education and encouraging behaviour change.

A number of national health campaigns to promote healthy lifestyles such as Stay Well, Stoptober, Change 4 Life and Dry January are now annual events.

These events are designed to raise public awareness of key health issues and encourage them to take action to benefit their own health. Whilst these campaigns are high profile and many people are aware of them the desired outcome of behaviour change is not happening and incidences of chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease are on the rise.

Health Education England (HEE) estimates that 40 per cent of the UK’s disability adjusted life years lost are attributable to tobacco, hypertension, alcohol, being overweight or being physically inactive [1].

Pharmacy role
It is important that pharmacy is recognised as a destination for patients to seek support across a range of health conditions as well as ‘staying well’ and therefore the development of services within the pharmacy setting is of critical importance.

Once pharmacy services have been established it is important that the entire pharmacy team can recognise and recruit patients into their service offering, as this will lock patients into the pharmacy and also help to really affect a change on public health within their communities.

To help support its members to encourage participation of services, Numark has launched an ‘Engaging Patients with Services’ interactive workshop.

Designed to benefit all pharmacy staff involved in recruiting patients into services, this workshop will also support pharmacies to get the most out of their Healthy Living Pharmacy/Health+ Pharmacy status by linking health promotions to services.

The workshops were launched in three locations across the country, with more workshops and venues to be added in the coming months.

The most recent workshop was held in Belfast on March 21 and was a resounding success.

Andrew Cheung, Harrison Healthcare said: “An excellent and energetic Numark Training workshop tonight, presented by Hina Prajapati. Lots of fantastic ideas and ways to engage patients with pharmacy services by encouraging them to take responsibility for their health and wellbeing whilst enabling the promotion of the pharmacy business at the same time. Looking forward to trying some of these new strategies in the pharmacy tomorrow!”

Numark’s Professional Development Facilitator, Hina Prajapati said: “The uptake for these sessions has been overwhelmingly successful – we’ve already delivered this workshop to over 100 delegates and will be opening up more venues to our members which is an exciting time! Encouraging our members to engage patients into services not only helps drive their profitability but also allows them to demonstrate the clear value the profession can play in preventing ill health and improving patient outcomes.”

All workshops are free of charge to Numark members, and cover:

The importance of selling services
Using different questioning techniques effectively
How to approach customers to engage with services and deal with their objections
Using positive language to persuade customers to engage with services
Understanding how everyone has a role to play in engaging patients with services
Using the health promotion zone as a stepping stone to link into services.