With Self-Care Week taking place across the NHS from 12 – 18 November, Arden & GEM has devised a ‘Self-Care Tooklit’ to support GPs in South Warwickshire to promote better self-care with their patients.
Following new NHS England guidance about the use of over the counter prescribing for minor health conditions, Arden & GEM’s medicines optimisation team worked alongside NHS South Warwickshire CCG to develop and launch a new self-care policy.
In order to support local GPs in implementing the policy, the CSU has produced a Self-Care Toolkit which acts as a step by step guide for practices to promote better self-care with their patients. The toolkit offers suggestions and resources to help practices engage their staff, engage their patients, put ideas into action, and to proactively target initiatives at appropriate patients.
In compiling the toolkit, the pharmacist led team reviewed existing resources to identify materials and ideas that would be easy to adopt, easy to use, had clear and concise messages and were low cost. For example, the Self-Care Forum has produced free of charge web buttons and page content which can be added to practice websites.
Encompassing website links, factsheets, consultation support tools and action plans, the toolkit aims to reduce the cost and time implications for GPs of promoting self-care, while providing clinically appraised activities and resources for immediate use.
The CSU will be extending the initiative to other CCGs as they launch their own self-care policies.
For more information about our medicines optimisation service, click here.