Palliative care pharmacists at Northern Trust rapidly developed a new service during the first COVID-19 surge to ensure more palliative and end-of-life patients would have access to specialist pharmacy input when they needed it.
By training additional staff, there was an opportunity to increase service provision, utilising palliative care pharmacy skills to undertake activities such as the symptom management of patients, appropriate management of medicines, improved access to medicines, advice for other healthcare professionals, and supporting discharge from the hospital.