Pamela MacPherson of Rowlands Pharmacy scooped this year’s hotly contested Healthy Living Advisor Award

One of the most hotly contested categories this year was the Healthy Living Advisor Award, sponsored by Kellogg’s All-Bran. Pamela MacPherson of Rowlands Pharmacy’s Kingston Crescent branch in Portsmouth, was ultimately crowned winner, with Awards judge and Healthy Living Pharmacy (HLP) tsar Deborah Evans declaring her “dedicated to the HLP concept,” and expressing admiration at the way she “has delivered consistently and is still finding ways to engage the community further”.

Pam trained to become a pharmacy technician nearly 25 years ago at the pharmacy she works in today. Like many, over the years she has juggled her career with the demands of being a parent, but it was working under a spate of locums and overseas pharmacists, plus the shift in pharmacy towards the provision of clinical and public health services, that acted as a catalyst for her professional life. Pam explains: “So began my mission in life to showcase what community pharmacy could offer and prove that we could make a huge difference to our communities’ health and wellbeing.”

A top performer

Being non-pharmacist manager of the Kingston Crescent pharmacy puts Pam in the perfect position to lead by example. Her branch was one of the first pharmacies in Portsmouth to pilot the HLP concept, winning HLP of the year and Pam being named HLP leader of the year in 2010. The amount of work involved in being awarded such accolades is significant, and it is arguably harder to stay at the top.

Yet this is exactly what Pam has done, upholding the pharmacy’s status as the top performer of services in the city, while also heading Health Champion networking meetings and providing advice to the local NHS organisation on how services can and should be delivered. Alongside this, Pam has embraced NHS Health Checks. Patient enrolment was initially poor, but when NHS Portsmouth gave opportunistic appointments the green light, Pam says: “I decided to make it my mission to get Portsmouth ‘Health Checked’!”

Five months later, she had increased uptake by over 1,000 per cent. She frequently incorporates other services into the checks, thereby increasing the number of patients benefiting from other initiatives such as alcohol management and smoking cessation. Weight management is very much part of Pam’s offering and recently she has started working with her local GP surgery to help those at risk of, or already suffering from, obesity-related illnesses.

She has many patients well on their way to losing 10 per cent of their starting body weight, with one individual celebrating reaching her 15 per cent weight loss goal. Pam highlights another patient who has improved her glycaemic control to such an extent by reducing her body mass index that her antidiabetic drugs have had to be overhauled. Pam’s next step is to capitalise on a recent course she attended on behaviour change that introduced her to the concept of MECC: making every contact count.

Pam says she likes to think that she already approaches her work in such a way, but she plans to run a training session on it for her team, saying: “It is about looking at the problems that are causing a problem, such as social issues or poor housing contributing to someone smoking. We might not be able to do anything directly, but we can do great things by listening and signposting to other services. I think it is how we can be truly exceptional.”

Exceptional is the perfect word to describe Pam, who concludes: “I am passionate about my work and get excited about every opportunity that comes my way in order to make pharmacy a great attribute to healthcare. I can honestly say that I love coming to work each day, knowing that I can make a difference.”

So began my mission in life to showcase what community pharmacy could offer and prove that we could make a huge difference to our communities’ health and wellbeing.