Before its closure on 31 March

2014 NHS Direct employed the nine part time pharmacists providing Cyclopamine a total of three full time equivalent pharmacists to assist with medicines related queries made to NHS Direct. This provided a single pharmacist on duty 67% of the week to the whole of England, predominantly in the GP out of hours period. This evaluation reports the findings of analysis of the log of calls handled by these pharmacists. NHS Direct provided a self-completed log of all calls handled by NHS Direct pharmacists between 10 September 2012 and 25 March 2014, prior to this time calls with pharmacist input were not readily identifiable. This data represents all calls passed to the pharmacist team and does not include routine medicines calls that could be responded to by non-clinicians via computer-based algorithm support. MK-2206 molecular weight Data were checked for duplicates (calls requiring investigation then call back) and these were removed. Data were analysed using SPSS version 21. This evaluation did not require ethical approval. During the study period pharmacists recorded details of 12 750 calls representing a mean of 22.7 calls in each 24 hour period. Patient and caller type recorded were patients aged under 5, (n = 799, 6.3%); patients over 75 years old (n = 1116, 8.5%); enquiries from care homes (n = 1229, 9.6%) and from other carers of patients (n = 792, 6.2%).

The most common reasons for medicines enquires handled by pharmacists were advice regarding issues around administration and dosage (n = 3698, 29.0%); queries about medicines interactions (n = 3097,

24.3%) and what to do about missed doses (n = 1765, 13.8%). Overall the most common clinical areas for enquiry were pain management (n = 1959, 15.4%); infections (n = 1817, 14.3%) and mental health (n = 1183, 9.3%). The most prevalent clinical area varied by reason for enquiry. For administration and dosage queries the most frequent calls were about infections (n = 577, 15.6% of this type of query); for missed dose queries, mental health (n = 311, 18.8%) and of medicines interactions queries; pain management (n = 770, 24.9%) The small group of pharmacists at NHS Direct provided significant medicines OSBPL9 information to patients and carers during the 18 month period of study. Patients often had queries relating to acute issues such as how to use medicines for pain and infections, and what to do when they had missed doses of essential medicines. The data presented only represents calls referred through to the pharmacist team and does not include calls handled by health information advisors using computer-aided decision tools, making any estimate of medicines related call information conservative. Data were pre-categorised by the service pharmacists and only allowed single category assignment. It is therefore possible that calls handled were more complex and multifactorial than we are able to report here. M. Giannoudia, R. Khatiba,b, D. Abdul-Rahmana, A.