Case study

‘Offering a travel health service has added a different slant to my job’

Mhairi Speirs, joint director, Hogarth Pharmacy, Glasgow

Mhari Speirs starting taking an interest in travel health when she was inundated with enquiries about a local school trip to Malawi. She found the parents of the pupils were in dire need of advice. “There seemed to be a lot of confusion about what vaccines and antimalarials could be prescribed and what had to be done privately, and a lot of conflicting advice,” she recalls. “Some people had been given very good information but others had got very poor advice, depending on where they had asked. I thought that there had to be something I could do to streamline the process.”

Ms Speirs decided to set up a travel clinic to capitalise on the gap in the market. Her first step was to attend a travel health conference hosted by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow’s Faculty of Travel Medicine, which led to her enrolling onto the faculty’s foundation course. She quickly realised there were no patient group directions (PGDs) used by her local NHS board – leaving her no other option than to independently prescribe travel medicines. She upgraded her existing supplementary prescriber qualification by completing an independent prescribing course, undertaking clinical sessions at a travel clinic located in the outpatient department of a Glasgow hospital.

Ms Speirs’ training didn’t stop there. “The [faculty’s] foundation course gave me a good grounding, but I still felt there were gaps in my knowledge, so I enrolled onto its diploma course,” she explains. “It’s a one-year long, really in-depth course, and I felt that it gave me the confidence to prescribe in this area and provide a really good standard of service.”

The extensive training soon paid off. The pharmacy’s travel clinic was up and running in late 2010 – offering a “one-stop shop” for travellers, who were able to get a full risk assessment, private vaccination and antimalarial service. The range was later extended further to offer yellow fever vaccine.

Today, GPs work with the pharmacy to refer patients in need of travel advice and services. The clinic runs on an appointment basis because of the amount of time consultations can take. Mrs Speirs’ experience of the Malawi school trip has prompted her to take her expertise to local schools, where she appears at evening meetings ahead of trips abroad.

Mrs Speirs’ efforts have certainly provided a new revenue stream for the pharmacy, but she also finds it rewarding on other levels. “It has added a different slant to my job – I love hearing where people are going and what they doing, whether it is going on holiday or doing some volunteer work,” she says. “I just find it really interesting.”

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