Parmjit Jagait

Please note this page was last updated in 2019. Visit Parmjit’s LinkedIn profile for more information.

Parmjit has been a Hospital Pharmacist for over 20 years having qualified from Kings’ College London. Since 2010 she’s been the Senior Principal Pharmacist, at Royal Brompton Hospital & Harefield Foundation Trust (RBHT), leading and managing a large Clinical Pharmacy team. Over the years Parmjit has seen how Clinical Pharmacy has progressed with Pharmacists becoming valued and integrated members of the multidisciplinary teams. However, even though technology has advanced the challenges have remained when it comes to the effective transfer of information across the primary and secondary care interface.

Digital Pioneer Fellowship project: Implementation of Transfer of Care Around Medicines (TCAM)

Problem: When patients move between care providers, especially from secondary care to primary care there is the risk of miscommunication and unintended changes to medications. This can lead to unnecessary readmissions and potential harm. 5% of hospital admissions have been attributed to preventable medicines related problems.

Solution:  Having robust systems and processes in place to help support the safe and effective transfer of information about patients’ medicines is required. This has been highlighted both globally and nationally. The challenge is finding an appropriate electronic solution as in-house audits have shown that anything more manual e.g. faxing, emailing is too time consuming and not effective.

Scale: Imperial College Health Partners Academic Health Science Network (ICHP) is partnering with Trusts in North West London to support the implementation of Transfer of Care Around Medicines (TCAM). The aim of the project is to implement a software solution to enable discharge information to be sent electronically to a patient’s nominated community pharmacy. Parmjit has agreed for her Trust to take part in this programme with herself being the lead.

Desired impact: The desired impact is to improve patient experience and safety with medicines when returning to the community following a hospital admission with the aim being to reduce re-admissions and reducing hospital stays. Some of the measures which will be looked at are the number of referrals made to community pharmacists, which is currently small for our Trust, the number of referrals accepted by community pharmacists and the number of referrals actioned e.g. around MUR’s and NMS.

Progress to date: As of December 2019, Parmjit’s project had successfully gone live and things have progressed with good collaboration. She has improved engagement internally with the IT team and externally with the Community Pharmacists. Referrals are being made and they have made approximately 30 referrals. The next stage is analysing the data to understand how they can improve the referral rate and what the barriers are that need to be overcome.