The main Trust pharmacy department is based on the Hellesdon Hospital site at Kingfisher House.
Its aim is to provide the Trust’s out-patients and in-patients with an efficient delivery of their medication via hospital transport to various sites. These are:
- Hellesdon Hospital (on-site wards)
- Norvic Clinic (regional forensic service)
- Julian Hospital (psychiatry of old age)
- Northgate Hospital
- Victoria House (Waveney community mental health team)
- Carlton Court (acute adult, psychiatry of old age, continuing care)
- West Norfolk (Churchill at Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Chatterton House)
We also provide medication supply, clinical services and emergency duty cover for private and independent units:
- St Luke's Hospital Trust, Attleborough (learning disabilities)
- Milestones, Rackheath (personality disorders)
Our aim is to get the best use of medicines in mental health, helping those people who need them get the right drug, dose and duration. We do this by using our enthusiastic staff to support people wherever they are, and have tried hard to cover everything. This includes offering help and resources to GPs, Community Pharmacies, users, carers, volunteer groups and advocates. If we’re not doing something we could do, please let us know.
The Pharmacy also provides medicines information to service users, carers, relatives, consultants, doctors and nurses through our medicines information telephone helpline, groups and various clinical activities (see links to the left)
With an award winning Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Database (1st of its kind), a clozapine clinic and a medicines dispensing machine (DORIS), the Hellesdon Pharmacy is truly unique!
We also have a pharmacy at Unthank Road for supervised consumption in substance misuse. (See link to the left for more information on our Unthank Road pharmacy).
Over the years we have done what we thought was the right thing for service users and carers. As it happens, many of these were the first in the UK as well:
- Lithium cards introduced (1987)
- Medicines Telephone Helpline (1989)
- “Bespoke” individualised and customised patient medication information sheets (1989)
- “Your Medicines – Any Questions?”/FAQ, first such comprehensive book (1992)
- Medication education sessions (MedEd) (1995)
- Website for service users launched (1997)
- Pharmacy discharge letter (1998)
- Pharmacist appointed as part of CRHTs (2001)
- Lithium database (2002)
- Automated dispensing using JVM (2006)
- MI Databank for recording medicine information queries (2006)
- Clozapine clinic one-stop shop (2007)
- Helpline extended to 6pm (2008)
- Website extended <http://www.choiceandmedication.org.uk/norfolk-and-waveney>)
- "Handy charts” unique comparison charts launched (2009)