Pharmacotherapy Quick Start Programme
The Pharmacotherapy Quick Start Programme will be delivered under the Primary Care Improvement Collaborative from Spring 2024. To find out more about the collaborative and apply to join, please visit the Join the Primary Care Improvement Collaborative webpage.
The programme takes primary care teams including GP clusters, GP practices and pharmacotherapy teams step-by-step through improving an aspect of pharmacotherapy, from how to understand their system to testing a change idea and monitoring improvement.
Teams can choose to work on any aspect of pharmacotherapy including:
- Acute prescribing
- Polypharmacy reviews
- High-risk medicines
- Hub working
- DMARDs monitoring
- Streamlining prescription requests
- Greener prescribing
- Serial prescriptions
Benefits of the programme
Our improvement advisors will provide hands-on support to help you get started with making improvements to an aspect of pharmacotherapy that can:
- enable staff involved in prescribing to work together effectively
- safely streamline prescribing processes, and
- enable pharmacotherapy and practice staff to fully utilise their skill sets.
During the programme, teams will be supported to:
- Explore your current system including prescribing data.
- Select a specific area to investigate and improve using tried and tested improvement tools.
- Test changes and monitor improvement.
- Share learning within clusters and further afield.
From October 2022 to November 2023, we have supported 47 primary care teams to use quality improvement methods to improve an aspect of pharmacotherapy in our Pharmacotherapy Quick Start Programme and our Primary Care Access Programme. Read about what teams achieved in the programme:
- Brief Insights: Reducing acute prescription demand with permissible repeats
- Brief Insights: Reducing phone calls with an online prescription request form
More information
You can find more information on our pharmacotherapy work by visiting:
If you have any questions relating to the programme or would like to speak to a member of the team, please get in touch by emailing his.pcpteam@nhs.scot.