A trip to my local practice forum

For those of you who don’t know, local practice forums bring together different learning providers such as CPPE and pharmacy schools. They provide opportunities for CPD, professional support and networking. Recently I attended my local practice forum and I was impressed. Not only was the food great (especially the desserts) the organisers were friendly and personally introduced themselves. Moreover, I came away feeling I had really learnt something.

The event started with an update on the NICE guidance for hypertension. This included the change in guidance in step 3 of the hypertensive treatment (when a diuretic is needed for addition to existing therapy with a calcium channel blocker and ACE inhibitor). Diuretics recommended are “thiazide like” diuretics such as indapamide instead of bendroflumethazide.  Next was a talk from a cardiology consultant updating us on the management of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). It was nice to delve back into some hardcore pharmacology as he talked us through various anti-platelets work at the receptor level. We learnt about the move towards tricagrelor a new anti-platelet for first line treatment in ACS in our NHS trust. I was interested to find out that in some patients (particularly of Asian ethnicity) genetic variants cause resistance to clopidogrel. This will not occur with tricagrelor. After the session we were presented with the opportunity to ask the speakers questions. This allowed me to ask the consultant about the risk and benefit of stopping anti-platelets temporarily in rectal (PR) bleeding.

The event wound up with pharmacists standing around and chatting, be it social or non-social. I even had a discussion with a community pharmacist about nomad systems (although a light-hearted one). This reinforced the importance of communicating with the community pharmacist about a nomad when dealing with patients discharge prescriptions for them.