The Official College of Pharmacists (COF) of Lleida will start a pioneering pilot plan in Catalonia in June to give scheduled weekly medication to older people living in municipalities of less than 1,500 inhabitants in the regions of Ponent, Alt Pirineu and Aran.
In the project, named DOSICAT, up to 360 people will be able to participate, which means that each of the 72 rural pharmacies in the demarcation will be able to offer the Servei Personalitzat Dosificació (SPD) to five people over 70 years of age, chosen through of a committee made up of pharmacists, Primary Care professionals and social workers.
In this way, the people chosen to benefit from the program will go to the pharmacy once a week to look for a personalized blister pack with all the medication they take classified by days and time slots.
The project will begin in June and will last six months, during which the committee will monitor each candidate to assess their pharmacological adherence and clinical evolution. However, from the COF Lleida they trust to be able to continue offering this service after these first months.
The SPD is a service that several pharmacies already offer in exchange for a “symbolic” price. For this reason, through this program we want to "value" this follow-up work in exchange for a remuneration for the pharmacists which, in this case, will be 25 euros per month per person who participates in the project, according to the president from COF Lleida, María Enrique-Tarancón.
In total, the project has a budget of 54,000 euros subsidized by the Lleida Provincial Council, while the individual blister packs will be financed by the company Venalink and Obra Social La Caixa.
The project seeks three main objectives: improve adherence to patient treatments, ensure the viability of rural pharmacies and stop depopulation. The main idea is to improve the care received by people who live in rural areas and ensure their health, since this initiative makes it easier for them to take their medication.
"If the adherence to the patient's treatment is good, their health improves and the optimization of resources also improves," says the member of the COF Lleida formation, Marta Huguet, who has remarked that the DOSICAT also optimizes the use of resources and, therefore, Therefore, it manages to have a “much more sustainable” healthcare system.
By remunerating the Servei Personalitzat de Dosificació, the project also contributes to the viability of rural pharmacies and to maintaining this service and the jobs it generates, which, in turn, also helps to reduce depopulation.
In fact, of the 201 pharmacies in the Ponent, Alt Pirineu and Aran regions, 72 are in municipalities with fewer than 1,500 inhabitants. These private companies are open 37 hours a week, while the medical offices in these rural towns are open an average of 10 hours. This means that rural pharmacies carry out an essential social function, in addition to the health one.
From the COF Lleida they are convinced that the DOSICAT will be a success. For this reason, they aim to maintain it beyond the six months that the program will last and, as far as possible, they intend to extend it to the rest of the municipalities with less than 1,500 inhabitants.
