Pharmacy Services

The service is NHS funded so you will not be charged to access it.

Why get your blood pressure checked? 

• High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is a condition which can be controlled to reduce your risk of a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular disease. 
• In the UK there are about five million adults (one in every nine) who have high blood pressure without even knowing it, since high blood pressure itself rarely causes symptoms. 
• The British Heart Foundation estimates that high blood pressure causes over 50% of heart attacks and strokes.
  

What does this free NHS blood pressure check involve?

We are offering free NHS blood pressure checks to people aged 40 and over with no appointment necessary.

This involves around 10-15 minutes in the pharmacy consultation room with our pharmacist. Following this, you may be invited to take home a blood pressure monitor that measures your blood pressure over 24 hours as you go about your daily life.

Depending on your blood pressure reading you may be referred to your GP. The pharmacist will guide you through any necessary steps depending on your blood pressure result.

The NHS Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS) connects patients who have a minor illness or need an urgent supply of a medicine with a community pharmacy. You can be referred to the service via NHS 111 or your GP practice.

If you have out of date or unwanted medicines, both prescription or over the counter drugs, don’t bin them or flush them. You can take your unwanted or out of date medicines back to your pharmacy for safe disposal, and it’s completely FREE. Each year enormous quantities of unused and expired medications are dumped into bins or flushed down toilets and sinks. The effects on the environment and human health are unclear but evidence is pointing to the presence of chemicals from prescriptions and over-the-counter medications in soil, drinking water and the surrounding environment. Just as proper medication administration is important, so is safe and cautious disposal.

We are able to obtain your prescriptions electronically without the need for a paper copy. Simply ask your GP Surgery to nominate our pharmacy in order for your prescriptions to be transferred to us automatically.

EMERGENCY HORMONAL CONTRACEPTION

If your regular contraception has failed or you have had unprotected sex in the last 5 days and you need emergency contraception, we can help.
We provide both, a Private and NHS service.
The NHS scheme is a FREE service. Please call ahead to ensure an accredited pharmacist is on duty. 

Private service:

The flu vaccine is given free on the NHS to adults who:

• Age 65+ years (including those turning 65 years on or before 31^st March 2024)

• Pregnant women (18+ years)

• Age 18+ years with any of the following conditions:

      - Diabetes

      - Asthma (treated with a preventer inhaler) / COPD or any other long-term lung condition

      - A long-term heart condition

      - Kidney or liver disease

      - A neurological condition such as Parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease or MS

      - A learning disability

      - A Body Mass Index (BMI) of 40 or more (severely overweight)

      - A weakened immune system (or are in close contact with someone who has a weakened immune system) due to a medical condition such as HIV, medication or treatment (e.g. cancer chemotherapy)

• Age 18+ years and:

      - A carer in receipt of carer’s allowance, or the main carer of an older or disabled person

      - A frontline healthcare worker in social care or a hospice that does not have an employer-led occupational health flu vaccination scheme

      - Living in long-stay residential care

It is important that you take the right dose of your prescribed medicines at the right time each day to get the most from your medicines to control your condition(s) as much as possible. This can sometimes be difficult if you take more than one medicine. One way in which this can be made easier is for your medicines to be supplied in a Monitored Dosage System, which provides you with a separate compartment for each dosage time of the day.

A monitored dosage system (MDS) is a medication storage device designed to simplify the administration of solid oral dose medication, especially for those on multiple medications. It aims to address the issues of difficulty accessing medication due to sight impairment or other disability and/or forgetfulness.

MDS devices are usually a variation on the design of a box or a blister pack, divided into days of the week with several compartments per day to allow for the different timing of doses such as breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime.

Our pharmacist can help identify which patients this type of system would be suitable for.

MDS may be suitable for patients in the following circumstances:

• You struggle to organise medications and find it difficult to remember to take them at the correct time each day
• You have a large number of medications to take each day
• You find it difficult to remove medication from its packaging
• You have a carer who helps you to ensure you take your medicines correctly.

Ask a member of our pharmacy team about whether this service would benefit you or whether there is another course of action, which may be of more help.

The Needle and Syringe Exchange Service is a free, confidential service for people who inject drugs. It is designed to reduce the spread of blood borne viruses by providing free, sterile injecting equipment and by disposing of used equipment safely.

When you are prescribed a new medicine by your doctor our pharmacists can offer support and advice to ensure you take the new medication as prescribed without suffering any unwanted side effects or explain any further questions you may have. We usually do this by keeping in contact with you during the first 4 weeks of your new medicine being prescribed.

The NMS can help:

• improve your adherence (taking your medicines correctly) which will generally lead to better health outcomes
• increase your engagement with your condition and medicines, supporting you to make decisions about your treatment and self-management
• reduce medicines wastage
• reduce hospital admissions due to adverse events from medicines

If you are looking to stop smoking then we can offer expert advice, support and a range of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products to help you achieve your goals. 

The NHS stop smoking service includes:

• FREE access to one-to-one behavioural support with a trained stop smoking advisor
• Supply of most suitable nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) product
• 12 week course
• Carbon Monoxide monitoring 

According to NHS data, you are 50-70% more like to quit with the aid of NRT when compared to not using anything at all. You are also four times more likely to stop smoking with help. 

Call the pharmacy to find out more

We can provide a supervised consumption service, usually in the private consultation room in the pharmacy.

The service is NHS funded so you will not be charged to access it.

Why get your blood pressure checked? 

• High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is a condition which can be controlled to reduce your risk of a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular disease. 
• In the UK there are about five million adults (one in every nine) who have high blood pressure without even knowing it, since high blood pressure itself rarely causes symptoms. 
• The British Heart Foundation estimates that high blood pressure causes over 50% of heart attacks and strokes.
  

What does this free NHS blood pressure check involve?

We are offering free NHS blood pressure checks to people aged 40 and over with no appointment necessary.

This involves around 10-15 minutes in the pharmacy consultation room with our pharmacist. Following this, you may be invited to take home a blood pressure monitor that measures your blood pressure over 24 hours as you go about your daily life.

Depending on your blood pressure reading you may be referred to your GP. The pharmacist will guide you through any necessary steps depending on your blood pressure result.

The NHS Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS) connects patients who have a minor illness or need an urgent supply of a medicine with a community pharmacy. You can be referred to the service via NHS 111 or your GP practice.

If you have out of date or unwanted medicines, both prescription or over the counter drugs, don’t bin them or flush them. You can take your unwanted or out of date medicines back to your pharmacy for safe disposal, and it’s completely FREE. Each year enormous quantities of unused and expired medications are dumped into bins or flushed down toilets and sinks. The effects on the environment and human health are unclear but evidence is pointing to the presence of chemicals from prescriptions and over-the-counter medications in soil, drinking water and the surrounding environment. Just as proper medication administration is important, so is safe and cautious disposal.

We are able to obtain your prescriptions electronically without the need for a paper copy. Simply ask your GP Surgery to nominate our pharmacy in order for your prescriptions to be transferred to us automatically.

EMERGENCY HORMONAL CONTRACEPTION

If your regular contraception has failed or you have had unprotected sex in the last 5 days and you need emergency contraception, we can help.
We provide both, a Private and NHS service.
The NHS scheme is a FREE service. Please call ahead to ensure an accredited pharmacist is on duty. 

Private service:

The flu vaccine is given free on the NHS to adults who:

• Age 65+ years (including those turning 65 years on or before 31^st March 2024)

• Pregnant women (18+ years)

• Age 18+ years with any of the following conditions:

- Diabetes

- Asthma (treated with a preventer inhaler) / COPD or any other long-term lung condition

- A long-term heart condition

- Kidney or liver disease

- A neurological condition such as Parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease or MS

- A learning disability

- A Body Mass Index (BMI) of 40 or more (severely overweight)

- A weakened immune system (or are in close contact with someone who has a weakened immune system) due to a medical condition such as HIV, medication or treatment (e.g. cancer chemotherapy)

• Age 18+ years and:

- A carer in receipt of carer’s allowance, or the main carer of an older or disabled person

- A frontline healthcare worker in social care or a hospice that does not have an employer-led occupational health flu vaccination scheme

- Living in long-stay residential care

It is important that you take the right dose of your prescribed medicines at the right time each day to get the most from your medicines to control your condition(s) as much as possible. This can sometimes be difficult if you take more than one medicine. One way in which this can be made easier is for your medicines to be supplied in a Monitored Dosage System, which provides you with a separate compartment for each dosage time of the day.

A monitored dosage system (MDS) is a medication storage device designed to simplify the administration of solid oral dose medication, especially for those on multiple medications. It aims to address the issues of difficulty accessing medication due to sight impairment or other disability and/or forgetfulness.

MDS devices are usually a variation on the design of a box or a blister pack, divided into days of the week with several compartments per day to allow for the different timing of doses such as breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime.

Our pharmacist can help identify which patients this type of system would be suitable for.

MDS may be suitable for patients in the following circumstances:

• You struggle to organise medications and find it difficult to remember to take them at the correct time each day
• You have a large number of medications to take each day
• You find it difficult to remove medication from its packaging
• You have a carer who helps you to ensure you take your medicines correctly.

Ask a member of our pharmacy team about whether this service would benefit you or whether there is another course of action, which may be of more help.

The Needle and Syringe Exchange Service is a free, confidential service for people who inject drugs. It is designed to reduce the spread of blood borne viruses by providing free, sterile injecting equipment and by disposing of used equipment safely.

When you are prescribed a new medicine by your doctor our pharmacists can offer support and advice to ensure you take the new medication as prescribed without suffering any unwanted side effects or explain any further questions you may have. We usually do this by keeping in contact with you during the first 4 weeks of your new medicine being prescribed.

The NMS can help:

• improve your adherence (taking your medicines correctly) which will generally lead to better health outcomes
• increase your engagement with your condition and medicines, supporting you to make decisions about your treatment and self-management
• reduce medicines wastage
• reduce hospital admissions due to adverse events from medicines

If you are looking to stop smoking then we can offer expert advice, support and a range of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products to help you achieve your goals.

The NHS stop smoking service includes:

• FREE access to one-to-one behavioural support with a trained stop smoking advisor
• Supply of most suitable nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) product
• 12 week course
• Carbon Monoxide monitoring 

According to NHS data, you are 50-70% more like to quit with the aid of NRT when compared to not using anything at all. You are also four times more likely to stop smoking with help. 

Call the pharmacy to find out more

We can provide a supervised consumption service, usually in the private consultation room in the pharmacy.