Everyone who works in a pharmacy has let out a deep sigh when hearing that a customer has gone into hospital or a care home, or been discharged back home. This is because while it is vital to find out if anything has changed and what needs to be done to make sure the patient gets the best care and outcomes as possible, obtaining the relevant information can be slow and frustrating at best, and seemingly impossible and infuriating at worst.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), more commonly associated with deciding which drugs are allowed to be prescribed on the NHS, has issued a number of guidance documents on this issue. All of these stress the importance of sharing information with all health and social care practitioners involved in a patient's care and the need for regular communication to ensure transfer of care is as smooth as possible.

Among the most important of these is the NICE guidance on medicines optimisation (QS120), which states:

• Patients should be involved in making decisions about their treatments and care as their adherence is likely to improve as a result, which in turn leads to better outcomes
• Incidents such as dispensing errors should be investigated and learned from so they are less likely to be repeated in the future
• Medicines reconciliation should be performed after a patient has come out of hospital and before they need a new prescription so that problems are identified and resolved as quickly as possible.

NICE also issued guidance (NG56) on how care can be improved for patients with multiple conditions €“ bearing in mind that the term covers things like substance misuse, sensory impairments such as hearing or sight loss, ongoing conditions such as learning disabilities, and system complexes such as frailty or chronic pain as well as defined physical and mental health illnesses. This is because many people are starting to feel overwhelmed by multiple appointments and complicated drug regimens. Pharmacy staff have a role to play in helping to identify patients who fall into this category.