Winter Illness

With increasing number of colds and coughs amongst adults, we would like you to refer to the below information about duration of symptoms and when to seek treatment from your GP. In most cases, these conditions are self-limiting and your community pharmacist should be your first point of contact. It is not uncommon for symptoms to last for 2 weeks and antibiotics have no effect and carry a risk of side effects. 

Common Cold

You can often treat a cold without seeing a GP. You should begin to feel better in about 1 or 2 weeks.

Cold symptoms come on gradually and can include:

• a blocked nose
• a sore throat
• headaches
• muscle aches
• coughs
• sneezing
• a raised temperature
• pressure in your ears and face
• loss of taste and smell

How you can treat a cold yourself

To help you get better more quickly:

• rest and sleep
• drink plenty of water (fruit juice or squash mixed with water is ok) to avoid dehydration
• gargle salt water to soothe a sore throat (not suitable for children)

If you have a high temperature or you do not feel well enough to do your normal activities, try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people until you feel better.

A Day in the Life of Our Pharmacy Team

Our lovely pharmacy team is (from left to right) Laura, KAthleen, Lisa and Freya with Roisin currently on maternity leave. The team consist of 2 pharmacists, a pharmacy technician and a pharmacy technician trainee.

Our team support the GP's by processing the discharge summaries that we receive after patients have been in hospital. Any medication changes are updated on the record and, where appropriate, the team contact the patient to check the new medication is working well and is understood. The hospital are expected to give us 28 days of medication initially to allow time for us to receive the discharge summary. By the time a patient needs the repeat prescription, our team enables it to be updated and correct on the record so it is a smooth, quick process for the patient to then request.

Some medication is not on repeat and is called an "accute" request. These are sometimes medications that need extra monitoring, are new or a patients has not had for quite a while and in order to speed up these being issued, we ask that patients put a detailed reason for the request. If there is nothing we will need to make contact to gather this information and this will take longer. All repeat requests take us 3 working days. Most prescriptions go electronically to your nominated pharmacy saving on time and paper, however, our community pharmacy colleagues will need a little longer to dispense it.

Your nominated pharmacy can be any pharmacy you want to pick it up from, this might be nearer to your workplace than where you live if this is more convenient.

Our pharmacy team make sure reviews for medication are completed, take queries from both patients and staff over supply issues locally and nationally and enable changes when directed from the local medicines management team and the Integrated Care Board (ICB).

Many reviews are now done by our pharmacy team rather than the GP. This is very common within general practice. Pharmacists are very knowledgable and skilled in this area and free up the GPs to see patients with other needs.

Surgery Training Afternoons

In order to keep our teams up to date we try and have afternoons when we close in order to provide protected learning time. However, due to the current demand from the winter we are cancelling our planned February session in order to provide the most availability along with all surgeries in Worthing. Therefore there are no planned closed afternoons at Broadwater Medical Centre in January and February 2023.

Coming in February's Newsletter...

A Day in the Life of our Patient Services Team. Being a receptionist has developed so much over the years that we have changed their title to reflect this. Hear what they do in February's edition.

Read December's Newsletter here.

Puzzle Time