Natasha Hoyle, neurosciences pharmacist, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Natasha led a large and complex audit of delays in the provision of disease modifying therapies to people with MS via her work with the MS academy. The project was an MS academy award winner and helped to expose the reasons for delay in the provision of disease modifying therapies.

Natasha then presented her work, and worked with all the stakeholders in the pathway, looking for ways to help efficiency and help teams to enact those measures. She achieved some extraordinary success and was able to significantly reduce the time that people had to wait, with no increase in staff or cost. A particular success was that she was able to reduce the time from decision to treatment with one particular therapy to one week: by far the lowest in the country.

She has also worked with the day care unit, and by arranging tests and prescriptions in advance people on infusible treatments wait a median of 2.1 hours less for the treatment on the day, and can be discharged quicker.

By proactively looking at medication costs and use of generics, she has helped to make changes that will save more than £1 million in drug costs per year, with no change in patient safety.

Natasha is a perfect example of the additional perspective and skills that a really interested, proactive, and capable pharmacist is able to offer an MS team, and how they can improve costs and efficiency, but, most importantly, the experience of people with MS.

To read the Outstanding MS Pharmacist case study, including the solutions, results, and more, click here and download the PDF or listen to pharmaphorum’s Deep Dive editor Eloise McLennan talking with Natasha Hoyle here.

Thank you to this year’s QuDoS in MS programme sponsors, Novartis and Roche.